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Nabeel Sulieman

Running .NET in Linux: Easier than I thought it would be

2015-11-11

I like C#. Especially with the asynchronous syntax and the .NET Web API framework writing REST APIs is great. I also really like running Linux servers: open source, easy set up and administration, security, and of course price.

So I went on a journey to get my .NET REST API service running on CentOS. It turns out I took the really long route, so hopefully this post will save people some time. The main false assumption I made was that you had to recompile the application with Mono to use it in Linux; the same way you would recompile a C++ program for Linux.

I'll skip the technical details and jump right to the conclusion: This is not true! All I had to do was compile in Visual Studio as usual, copy the binaries over and run the executable with mono:

mono MyService.exe

And that is all there is to it! I love it when things like this happen.