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.NET Rocks!

I recently had the impossible task of making one of my applications work on OS X. The school uses Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to house its huge volumes of data. The server is integrated with Active Directory to allow for trusted connections. This means that when a client connects to the server, they need only to authenticate locally in the domain. This makes password and privilege maintenance much easier.

The bad part is that only Windows client operating systems are capable of supporting trusted connections (NT Authentication). This means that I can't write a program to interface with the database server unless it's running on Windows. So when I was asked to make my Windows creation work on a Mac, I was at a loss. Fortunately, I had been writing the suite of tools in VB.NET, so I started investigating the possibility of running a .NET app on OS X.

I found two contenders: Mono and DotGNU Portable .NET. Both projects are free implementations of the .NET standard. Mono doesn't seem to have the anti-Microsoft sentiment and was easier to install. Right out of the gate, Mono allowed me to run a .NET app on OS X. PNET complained about ncurses not being installed. While this is probably a simple fix, it was one step that Mono did not require.

The end result? I managed to clone my VB.NET app in C# and make it run smoothly on a Mac. High five for .NET!