SchoolWorks on Linux: Part 1 of Many

Now that SchoolWorks has officially been released, I guess I can begin posting about my attempts to get it running on Linux.

First of all SchoolWorks is school administration software (or SIS) built using:

• ASP.NET 2.0 (in Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005)
• PostgreSQL (thanks to Npgsql)
• Crystal Reports (great for report designers, abhorrent for developers)

We also used the following support tools:

• Bugzilla
• Subversion and TortoiseSVN
• PgAdmin III

While Visual Studio and ASP.NET can be frustrating at times, the only part of SchoolWorks that I avoid like the plague is working with Crystal Reports.

Recently I’ve been trying to build SchoolWorks using Mono on Linux. I’ve successfully built Mono (libgdiplus + mono + mcs + xsp) on my personal Debian Etch, but I haven’t gotten much of SchoolWorks to compile yet.

The first missing feature was Decimal.TryParse which we use a lot in SchoolWorks. I submitted (my very first!) patch to the mono-devel mailing list in hopes of getting support for Decimal.TryParse added.

I’ll try to keep posting my progress as it should be interesting to SchoolWorks users as well as .NET/Mono developers.