.NET console app on Mono on Raspberry Pi writing to MySQL (compiled on a Mac)

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 21:18:29 +0000

Update: if you’re just looking to build a simple LAMP server on a Pi, then there is an updated version of this guide which installs more up to date versions of e.g., PHP, here.

For reasons I won’t go into, I have an unnecessarily complicated set of requirements:

Dev environment is Windows 10 + Visual Studio 2015 running as a virtual machine inside VMWare Fusion on Max OSX 10.11.6
Target application is .NET 4.5.2 running on a Raspberry Pi 3 under Mono
App must write data to MySQL db

This is my first time working with Mono. It’s actually relatively straight-forward to setup, but there were one or two hoops I jumped through, so I figure this may be helpful. You could choose to use VSCode on your Mac if you didn’t want to go down the Windows dev VM route.

TL;DR

The main issue I encountered is the latest MySQL Connector for .NET that you get using NuGET doesn’t seem to work in Mono. The trick was to install an early version (6.4.6 to be exact) and once I did this, all seemed to work OK. Have not got much further yet, so not yet sure what other issues I will encounter.

This assumes you have a completely fresh copy of Raspbian latest. If you haven’t, follow a guide here. I used Etcher for the first time and was very impressed as it worked perfectly.

I am using the -Lite (no UI) version so may have had to do extra stuff that the full fat version didn’t require. I also configured Apache/PHP etc. so I could have phpmyadmin running.

.NET application output app.config settings at runtime nicely formatted

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 15:29:06 +0000

I’m a big fan of .NET console applications. They’re a really quick way of getting something functional up and running fast without wasting loads of effort on user interfaces. (Hey, I’m a developer, OK… not a designer. Function over form and all that.)

I also make heavy use of the built-in app.config / settings functionality so that I can control functionality at runtime. One thing I wanted to do recently was to output the configured settings to the console window so that I could eyeball all was well before going ahead.

Dotnet on Matt Thornton

.NET console app on Mono on Raspberry Pi writing to MySQL (compiled on a Mac)

.NET application output app.config settings at runtime nicely formatted