Orchard begins to work under Mono

After 4 days of work, the first Orchard screen rendered:

This is just a start as it's only the setup screen, but it's a major step forward and a sign that Mono supports MVC3/Razor well enough to run a pretty complex application Orchard is. Make no mistake - the simplicity of the screen is misleading. Behind the scenes we have a whole lot of dynamic objects created using DLR, lots of components built, assemblies loaded, files parsed and code generated. Note also that NO changes were needed to Orchard code in order to make this happen.

I have modifed the setup screen code a bit to show that it indeed runs on Mono :)

The next step is set up SQL and see what breaks next :). It's a good start though!

To test this yourself you will need:

• Mono from the master branch (all the necessary fixes are ported to the mono-2-10 as well but I haven't really tested it with 2.10 so I can't certify it works there)
• MonoDevelop from its master branch (xbuild will currently not work).

After the build is done make sure to remove the Orchard.Web/bin/Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure.dll assembly as Mono provides its own version. And remember that Orchard is a .NET 4.0 application - you need to use the following command to run it:

MONO_IOMAP=all xsp4