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I'm a newbie and want to deploy ASP.NET web site and host it on UBUNTU 12 either server or desktop.

  1. Should i use Apache with MONO? OR
  2. Deploy MS .NET Framework on Wine and a free web server that is made for Windows?

If a complete set of instructions exists for either options would appreciate if you can provide the link since the information i find on the internet is mostly fragmented instructions and difficult for me to understand

p.s. free web server for windows is either from UtilDev or Abyss both have free editions for windows

thanks in advance

2 Answers 2

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I think there's a third option you're omitting which needs serious consideration: Don't.

Let's start with the options you're putting up:

  1. Mono is good (for things built for Mono) but it's not tested nearly as well and that's really very important when you're dealing with online services because there's little to reassure you that it'll work reliably and even if it does, will it be secure?

    If it's a local-only project and the site works, that's probably good enough. If this is online and a widely used resource, it's going to get probed for vulnerabilities by bad people (every site does). I wouldn't be confident Mono was suitable.

  2. Wine won't work. It's not just .NET you need running, it's the whole IIS stack. There's no separation between real Windows and IIS so from both legal and technical standpoints, it's dead in the water.

If you absolutely had to stop there and pick one of those it's a no-brainer. Mono wins every time. But those aren't your only two options. There's the third option where you just don't attempt to run an ASP.NET website under Ubuntu. That leaves you with two options:

  • Use a proper Windows/IIS/SQL Server/ASP.NET stack.
  • Port the website to something portable (PHP/Django/etc)

I was in a similar situation in 2010. I had moved my desktop to Ubuntu a few years before hand and was finding it really hard to maintain a personal website because it was thousands of lines of compiled ASP.NET. It required loading Visual Studio in XP on VirtualBox if I wanted to make major changes.

This is more extreme than your situation but rewriting in a more suitable framework was the best thing I've done with the site.

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  • thanks for the detailed response and sharing your experiment, it looks like for me its going to be Eclipse/Java/Tomcat/Apache/MySql Aug 3, 2012 at 15:54
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    Regardless of the purity of your intentions, the question was asking "how do I get X working?", not "should I use X?".
    – noffle
    Aug 3, 2012 at 16:07
  • @noffle "Don't do it" has long been considered a valid answer to a question, for all the right reasons. See: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8891/… It might not be the most useful answer this question gets, but it's something for the OP to consider.
    – Oli
    Aug 3, 2012 at 16:12
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Mono framework hands down. Wine is for running apps and games on your desktop nothing more if you ask me. It crashes too much and has too many bugs--it's not stable enough to deploy anything for production.

Mono is designed for cross platform for C# and .NET. I reckon its your best bet and should work.

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  • Bill, is there a complete set of instruction for a newbie like me to follow to install mono and Apache with a nice easy to use GUI? Aug 3, 2012 at 15:01
  • Quite a good guide here for porting .NET apps mono-project.com/Guide:_Porting_ASP.NET_Applications Hopefully that can help.
    – LinuxBill
    Aug 3, 2012 at 15:07
  • Thanks bill, although this is for open suse i will try to do the same thing on Ubuntu Aug 3, 2012 at 15:17
  • No bother. Im no software dev just lending some knowledge. Oli above seems like he knows his stuff on development though might be worth giving that a read aswell.
    – LinuxBill
    Aug 3, 2012 at 15:35

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