Mono experience

[rogeralsing]

We do have a problem in the fact that the core team does have too little Mono experience.
I think we should try to improve on this topic.

So first question to our Mono friends;

What is the simplest way to code and debug stuff in Mono land?
I have Sharpdevelop installed in Ubuntu, but that can not open vs2012 solutions.
How do you deal with this?

[rogeralsing]

How do I build Akka.NET on mono?

bash build.sh Build
Throws and says "Project in imports is empty" on the fsproj files.

[ZigMeowNyan]

While SharpDevelop is nice, I'm pretty sure the "official" IDE for mono is MonoDevelop. It's cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux), although the Windows and Mac versions are distributed as "Xamarin Studio", which is essentially a branded MonoDevelop with some Xamarin plugins irrelevant to Akka. I guess you could also build vanilla MonoDevelop from source, but it makes more sense to just use the same packaging as everyone else.

It might be worthwhile to attempt to build Akka in MonoDevelop/XamarinStudio on windows first, and then look into making sure you've got all the package dependencies in your Linux distro afterwards. On that note, I downloaded the dev branch of Akka.net, opened it up in Xamarin Studio 5.1 (current version is 5.7) on Windows and hit Rebuild in the Debug configuration. Everything seemed to work except for the following three projects:

• Akka.TestKit
• Akka.Remote.TestKit
• Akka.Cluster.Tests

They all failed with the same error - "This project type is not supported by Xamarin Studio." Here's a screenshot for you:

Seems like the built-in Unit Test project type isn't handled by Xamarin/MonoDevelop. But at least the core system builds. Seems like you could probably open this on Linux with the MonoDevelop IDE with little effort and attempt a build.

Also of note is the recent OSS-ing of MSBuild, which is might make an impact on the cross-platform toolchains. But it seems like Mono's XBuild currently handles most of what's needed.

[rogeralsing]

@Aaronontheweb any idea whats causing that?

Do I need to make the PI open up for inc connections?
I recall seeing similar problems on a real nix machine.
[edit]
Getting the same error if trying to connect from the PC to the PI.

Anyone know how to open up for inc connections?

[Aaronontheweb]

I saw this on my dedicated Ubuntu machine too. Just realized that I introduced a bug in the RelativeActorPath class when I was trying to work around the Mono URI issues - so it could be that.

The other cause of this issue was a simple port binding problem - saw some issues where binding to port 0 for outbound connections intermittently failed. I'm not familiar enough with POSIX sockets to know why just yet.

Your inbound server is probably working fine - it's been the outbound one that's been acting suspect.

[Aaronontheweb]

This should work fine now - just ran all of the Akka.Cluster and Akka.Remote samples locally on Ubuntu 14.04 with the latest version of Mono.

[rogeralsing]

The project still references the old version of Helios.
And even with the updated version, it does not succeed to listen to the server Port under Rasbian.

[Edit]
My bad, both chat client and server is listening.

netstat -pnlt | grep '/mono' lists both of them.
So far so good.

[Edit again]
Turns out that if I initialize the connection from the PI to the laptop, it does work fine.
But if I init from laptop to PI, I get connection refused.

Id guess thats some sort of config thing in linux/rasbian, and that akka.net now runs fine on mono 👍
Kudos to @Aaronontheweb !!

[Aaronontheweb]

@rogeralsing thanks :)

Sounds like RaspberryPI doesn't allow inbound connections by default - good to know!

[rogeralsing]

The server now runs fine on the RPI, turned out that it was the RPI Firewall iptables causing it, stopping this service solved the problem.

[rogeralsing]

As far as I can tell, we play nicely with Mono.
If the Raspberry PI issues are real issues, they seems to be related to the Mono threadpool, not Akka.NET itself.

Should we consider this one done?

[stefansedich]

Mmm have we tried with mono 4 on the pi? I was hoping to do more over my
break looking into mono but my internet access was horrible at best.

I have ran with remoting in production under mono so far without a hitch so
I am happy with that part.

Cheers
On 6 Apr 2015 9:56 am, "Roger Alsing" notifications@github.com wrote:

As far as I can tell, we play nicely with Mono.
If the Raspberry PI issues are real issues, they seems to be related to
the Mono threadpool, not Akka.NET itself.

Should we consider this one done?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#694 (comment).

[rogeralsing]

Any pointers to how to get mono 4 on the rpi?

[stefansedich]

No sorry have not done it myself yet.
On 6 Apr 2015 3:22 pm, "Roger Alsing" notifications@github.com wrote:

Any pointers to how to get mono 4 on the rpi?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#694 (comment).

[ZigMeowNyan]

The current mono release is still 3.12.1 from March 7th. They've drafted the release notes for 4.0, but it hasn't actually been released yet despite the link being tossed around social media.

If you want to try version 4 (which has apparently merged in a lot of code from .NET core), you'll probably have to build it from source, either by compiling locally on the Pi or through a cross-compiler. Not sure which branch is relevant, though the above draft notes mention commit 519ddb9895af5639de5ba0361af54a8d585c4070. That commit is showing on the master branch, so maybe building from git would be enough.