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I am curios to use .NET for some web applications (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2). However my budget is limited so I would like to use Mono on Linux. I have never used Mono before, and I haven't read about any bigger sites that is using Mono+Linux on the server in production.

What's your experience using Mono on Linux in production? How is the performance and stability compared to .NET on Windows Server?

Is there any popular sites that is using it in production? Any articles available online were they share their experiences?

Jonas
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    This doesn't answer your question, but you can get ASP.NET shared hosting accounts for the same money (in the under-$10/mo ballpark) as Linux accounts. – Adam Lear Oct 02 '10 at 22:44
  • @Anna: Thanks, that's informative. But I'm mainly looking for a few VPS's. And it is also easier to set up a few development-/test-servers at home in VirtualBox if there is no licenses to pay. – Jonas Oct 02 '10 at 22:49
  • @Anna are the linux accounts in question shared or not? – alternative Oct 02 '10 at 23:16
  • @mathepic Yes. The accounts are virtually identical in terms of features (with minor variations on available disk space and whatnot), with the main difference being Linux/Rails support vs Windows/ASP.NET. – Adam Lear Oct 02 '10 at 23:30
  • Not a real answer, but I've created Winforms applications with Mono. They work perfectly fine, no hitches at all. – Robert Harvey Oct 04 '10 at 18:28

1 Answers1

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I've been doing some mono mvc stuff on my mac (unix not linux) in the recent weeks and have found mono combined with monodevelop to be a pretty featured and useful environment.

So far in a few prototype sites I haven't yet ran into any deal breakers or major issues.

In the next few weeks I'll be deploying some sites to linux vps servers. So I'll comment on my experience.

[Update]
So this answer was a long time ago and it's taken me a while to get some stuff up and running.

So my experience: mono-2.10.1 or higher is feature complete for asp.net mvc2 (mono-2.8 had some bugs that required a source compile) and it's now being used by a few cloud providers.

Running on mono-2.8 http://srvd.in/

AppHarbor: http://unwind.apphb.com/

DeployFu: http://unwind.deployfu.com/

I've found it stable and easy to develop with, like I said there were 2 annoying bugs in the 2.8 version but they are fixed in 2.10.1.

I'm happy to elaborate based on comments.

[Update] I've blogged here about deploying mono + xsp4 + nginx: http://www.thomasvjames.com/2012/07/asp-net-4-on-mono-part-2-automating-deployment/

Community
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Thomas James
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