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From .NET to Linux in Five Easy Steps
By Joseph Hill
Novell Connection Magazine - February 2010

Here's an excerpt:

If yours is like most IT organizations, today's economic downturn is forcing you to look long and hard at driving down costs, and Linux certainly has significant cost advantages over proprietary operating platforms. That presents a problem for .NET shops. They typically have a repertoire of .NET applications, many of them handling critical business processes. The problem is that .NET applications don't run in the Linux environment.

What's more, organizations deploying .NET have made a considerable investment in developers skilled in .NET and Visual Studio, and pushing these developers outside their Visual Studio comfort zone is costly and involves long learning curves. Hiring new developers with skills in other environments is even more costly, and new developers face a significant learning curve in coming up to speed on the organization's business.

If yours is a .NET shop, Novell has the key that enables you and your organization to leverage .NET applications and Visual Studio skills in Linux environments. How? With Mono and Mono Tools for Visual Studio.

Mono is a software platform that allows you to run .NET applications on other platforms. Sponsored by Novell, Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. It provides a runtime environment that can execute compiled .NET code on a wide variety of operating platforms, including Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X and even mainframes (a capability unique to Mono).

The Mono Tools for Visual Studio is a new offering for developers targeting the Mono platform. It's a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio that enables developers to develop .NET applications for execution on Mono-enabled platforms, all within the developer's preferred development environment—Visual Studio. With Mono Tools for Visual Studio, developers can build, debug and deploy .NET applications targeting other platforms, including Linux, while continuing to leverage the extensive ecosystem of code, libraries and tools available for .NET.

With Mono and Mono Tools for Visual Studio, .NET-skilled developers can easily migrate .NET applications to Linux. What's more, they can develop, debug, test and deploy new .NET applications for Linux as well as other platforms, all without leaving their Visual Studio comfort zone. This article presents a straightforward, five-step process for using Mono and Mono Tools for Visual Studio to move from .NET to Linux. The Mono Tools automate much of the work.

Read the article here

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It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.