Portable.NET

Portable.NET is a suite of free software tools for building and running applications for the Common Language Infrastructure, better known as.NET. net.

The initial platform for which it was developed was GNU/Linux, but DotGNU Portable.NET also works under Windows, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X, among others. It also runs on a wide variety of architectures: x86, PPC, ARM, Sparc, s390, Alpha, ia-64, and PARISC.

DotGNU Portable.NET seeks compatibility with the ECMA-334 and ECMA-335 specifications for C# and CLI, and with Microsoft's commercial.NET implementation. The main goal is to facilitate the development of portable applications that work on both the DotGNU Portable.NET platform and Microsoft.NET.

The Portable.NET project has many similarities to Novell's Mono project. Both try to provide an alternative to.NET technology by developing a free implementation of Microsoft's.NET application and services framework.

Components

The main components of the suite are: treecc, pnet, pnetlib, to which are added the following optional components: pnetc, ml-pnet and cscctest

Pnet

contains the runtime environment, C# compiler, and other development tools.

Pnetlib

Contains the core C# libraries, including: mscorlib, System, System.Xml, System.Drawing, System.Windows.Forms, etc.

TreeCC

A programming tool complementary to Flex and Bison used to assist in the development of the portable.net compiler, cscc.

PnetC

This is the C compiler library based on glibc.

Ml-pnet

Some of the mono libraries are used together with DotGNU scripts that allow them to be used with DotGNU tools.

How to run programs in MSIL

Use the command ilrun followed by the name of the executable, with or without its extension.

ilrun can be registered with the Linux kernel as follows: ilrun --register; this allows you to run the program without having to type ilrun every time. ilrun can be unregistered as follows: ilrun --unregister.