Mono as a lightweight .NET runtime

How big is .NET 3.5 runtime? The full redistributable package for x86, x64 and ia64 platforms including 2.0 and 3.0 is about 200 MB. Not a single user needs to download and install it all: somebody already has 2.0 or maybe even 3.0, and nobody is going to install all the supported architectures (x86 etc.) on a single machine. So this huge download is only intended to be distributed on a CD or DVD with applications requiring .NET, when you don’t know in advance what platform you are targeting. If you do know the user’s platform in advance, you can downstrip the package down to some 20-60 MB. Which is pretty good.

Anyways .NET Framework has to be installed using Windows Installer, and it’s a quite invasive way of deploying an application. Can somebody XCOPY-install .NET Framework? I suppose it to be very tricky if possible at all. And we have those copyrights and license agreements saying that Windows Installer is the only legal way to deploy .NET runtime to users.

All this problems might seem illusive, since Microsoft is pushing .NET Framework through Windows Update and starting from Windows XP SP3 and Vista RTM users get at least .NET 2.0 installed. But the e-health market, my company works in, is very conservative (at least in Germany) and users are still running Windows 2000 with windows apps emulating DOS-like GUI. It is horrible! We can not rely on any Windows Updates or even a live and fast internet connection to run the .NET Framework setup bootstrapper. Moreover, our software, a web service, should be deployed as an integrated component into some third party application (almost definitely not a .NET one). And the more complex our deployment story is, the less partners would want to embed our software into their products.

Are there any alternatives out there?

One can turn to virtualization solutions. But instead of hardware virtualization, one can virtualize the .NET runtime. Using Xenocode Postbuild it is possible to compile a managed application into an unmanaged one with embedded fully functioning .NET runtime. The size of an app starts from 11 MB for a simple Hello World App and is from 40 MB in a real world scenario (without deleting unused .NET code, so that reflection can work properly). And this is pretty good, although not cheap.

Here comes Mono

There is also the Mono Project out there, which contains an open source runtime compatible with .NET CLR on binary level. It means that you can run apps compiled for .NET CLR on Mono CLR without recompilation. Mono’s cross-platform nature makes it much simpler in what it means to deploy the runtime. You just have to fulfill the requirements of the LGPL or obtain a commercial license from Novell.

How it works?

So I downloaded and installed the full Mono for Windows package and started to play with it. My aim was to get a minimal subset of Mono to be able to run the Mono’s XSP development web server and its test web site (\lib\xsp\test\).

The result is the following structure of 45 files only 21 MB in size total:

\bin\libglib-2.0-0.dll
\bin\libgthread-2.0-0.dll
\bin\mono.dll
\bin\mono.exe
\bin\run.cmd
\etc\mono\2.0\Browsers
\etc\mono\2.0\DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx
\etc\mono\2.0\machine.config
\etc\mono\2.0\settings.map
\etc\mono\2.0\web.config
\etc\mono\2.0\Browsers\Compat.browser
\lib\mono\2.0\Accessibility.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\gmcs.exe
\lib\mono\2.0\gmcs.exe.config
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.Data.Tds.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.Messaging.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.Posix.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.Security.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.Web.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.WebBrowser.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\Mono.WebServer2.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\mscorlib.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Configuration.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Configuration.Install.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Core.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Data.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Data.Linq.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Drawing.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.EnterpriseServices.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.IdentityModel.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.IdentityModel.Selectors.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Messaging.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Runtime.Serialization.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Security.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.ServiceModel.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.ServiceModel.Web.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Transactions.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Web.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Web.Extensions.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Web.Services.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Windows.Forms.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Xml.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\System.Xml.Linq.dll
\lib\mono\2.0\xsp2.exe

It is still far from perfection (why ASP.NET applications need System.Windows.Forms, for example), but it is a good proof of concept. I’m only a newbie to the whole world of Mono. But now I can start a web site on a windows machine without any .NET Framework installed from a website folder just like this:

..\mono-mini-2.6.1\bin\run.cmd ..\mono-mini-2.6.1\lib\mono\2.0\xsp2.exe –root . –port 8080 –applications /:.

In order to make it repeatable, I made a batch script that creates this Mono-mini package out of a real Mono installation. It can be used like this:

mono-mini.cmd c:\work\ExternalBin\Mono-2.6.1 c:\temp\mono-mini-2.6.1

Summary

I’ve got an XCOPY-deployable .NET runtime for my ASP.NET web services with 3.5 support in under 21 MB (7.5 MB zipped) which works on my machine 🙂 What now?

• I need to test it thoroughly with the apps I will run on it. It is still possible that some components are missing.
• Also I might remove the Windows Forms dependency but it would require me to patch the machine.config and the global web.config though.
• All this bin\, lib\, etc\ coming from the linux-background of Mono could easily be simplified for the Mono-mini package.
• Some licensing questions are yet to be clarified. When licensed under LGPL, Mono is not allowed to be embedded into a non-LGPL executable, AFAIK. So, making deployment even more simple with Xenocode (only as an assembly repackaging solution) or .NETZ (for the same purpose) is not possible without purchasing the commercial license from Novell.

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