BANGALORE, INDIA: Eclipse is one of the most popular open source IDEs used by developers for building applications on Java and other open source programming languages with ease. A developer would never have chosen Eclipse for building Microsoft .NET Framework apps until Emonic was released. Emonic, short for Eclipse Mono Integration is a plug-in that gives Eclipse the capability to provide a development environment for building C# applications with .NET Framework.

Though Eclipse platform supported development of C and C++ based applications through C Development Toolkit (CDT), but that toolkit couldn't be used for C# development. This is because apps built with C# required .NET Framework to run. Emonic acts as the integration bridge between Eclipse and Mono, which is the open source adaptation of .NET Framework libraries, and thus providing the ability to work with C# and .NET in Eclipse.

Let's see how Eclipse can be transformed to support C# development with the use of Emonic plug-in, whereby one can develop, build and debug C# apps, and migrate existing .NET Framework projects onto Eclipse workspace from Visual Studio.

Emonic with NAnt
Emonic is an Eclipse plug-in that allows you to build C# apps with Mono or the Microsoft .NET Framework. It provides a project wizard, editor, auto-builder and launcher for C# projects. Building a C# project using Emonic alone can be a difficult task. To make this easier, you can use Nant, a .NET build tool which works similar to Ant and supports .NET Framework version 1.0 to version 3.5. The latest NAnt build tool is in version 0.86 Beta 1 and can be downloaded from nant.sourceforge .net. Emonic plug -in for Eclipse can be installed in either of the two ways: downloading from SourceForge or updating Eclipse through an update site.

The Emonic plug-in can be downloaded as a zipped file from emonic.sourceforge.net. To install this plug-in into Eclipse, just extract the zipped file into a temporary directory, and then copy the contents of features folder into the features folder of your Eclipse installation, and in the same way copy the contents of the plug-ins folder into the plug-ins folder of your Eclipse installation.