I’m starting out on a new project and a team member has decided to use C# as the implementation language. I don’t have a lot of experience in C#, but a brief reading shows that it’s very capable of being a complete cross-platform vm. Beyond the language, I’ve been having trouble selecting tools and workflows for managing the code as the project grows. It should be fairly small (<10K lines) but I would like to have the ability to generate documentation as the project grows, manage any external dependencies that we decide to use, and automate builds and testing. I am wondering what tools are commonly used or considered best practices for this language.
I am mainly concerned with how would a build system potentially work on *nix as well as windows? Are there C# specific tools or is Make more common? In addition, I’d like to use a dvcs, but it doesn’t look like Visual Studio and MonoDevelop support the same ones. What’s the common vcs of choice for C#? For testing sort of Unit testing is available for C#/Mono? Finally, I know that there are good doc generators, but with the question of the build system, I would really like to have that just be a single step in the build similar to how testing is a step. Normally I’d automate with Hudson, but I am wondering if there is something more specific to the platform.
Overall, I’d love to see a solution that provides a decent workflow on both windows and *nix without a heavy admin burden. I am pretty sure this is the holy grail of project management, so anything that puts me on that path is awesome.
In a project I work on, we use Visual Studio 2010, MonoDevelop/XBuild, Git, and monodoc. Project files created by Visual Studio 2010 can easily be read by MonoDevelop and XBuild. Also, Git is an excellent VCS for distributed development (I especially like its branching). Monodoc, with some tweaking of command line parameters, can generate documentation from XML comments in code.