Are there any good portable C# compilers?

[MKSheppard]

By that I mean portable in the sense of Orwell Dev C++ -- in that you can just plop them in a directory and go program away; without the program deploying dependencies and installs all over your system.

I know, I could just run my C# development environment in a XP virtual machine, but that's a lot of extra work to develop for KSP.

[Echo 8 ÉRÀ]

Portable as in you can use any Windows machine to code (since you mentioned Dev C++ and AFAIK it's Windows only) or portable as in you can use any OS?

If it's the former, just use Microsoft's .Net compilers. They get installed as part of the client version of the .Net Framework in "C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\v<Version Number>\" to support stuff like CodeDom.

[MKSheppard]

Portable as in I can just unzip it to a folder and start programming away -- I don't like installing tons of dependencies and stuff on my computers.

in any case, it's academic as I installed Visual C# 2010 into a XP SP3 virtual machine I keep handy.

[Faark]

I'm not aware of any. I "solved" the problem for myself by installing Visual Studio on my notebook and using Remote Desktop whenever i sit on another PC.

[Echo 8 ÉRÀ]

Portable as in I can just unzip it to a folder and start programming away -- I don't like installing tons of dependencies and stuff on my computers.

in any case, it's academic as I installed Visual C# 2010 into a XP SP3 virtual machine I keep handy.

That doesn't clear things up. The reasoning for my question is that there is a huge difference if all you want to do is work on any Windows machine (which is practically guaranteed to have at least .Net 2.0 installed nowadays) and being able to work with any OS. AFAIK, there isn't a portable cross-platform .Net runtime, so if you want to work on a Linux machine one day and then a Mac machine the next, without any guarantee of the necessary dependencies being installed, a VM is the only solution. If all you care about is unzipping your projects on Windows machines, it's a simple matter of learning how to call the c# compiler via the commandline and then automating it via makefiles. I did something similar with the latter back in Uni, as some of the Uni computers only had VS 6.0 and DevC++ installed and I had some little personal projects I wanted to be able to work on between lectures.

[sal_vager]

KSP actually uses Mono for the plugins so they work across all three platforms, well it's Unity that uses it really.

So you could try looking at MonoDevelop

[Echo 8 ÉRÀ]

KSP actually uses Mono for the plugins so they work across all three platforms, well it's Unity that uses it really.

So you could try looking at MonoDevelop

MonoDevelop requires that they install dependencies (Mono on non-Windows machines, .Net on Windows), which they don't want to do. Unity gets away with it because it hosts its own custom Mono runtime.

EDIT: On Windows, you can get away with it since the .Net Framework gets preinstalled in Windows Vista onwards (except for the case where a user chooses to remove it). Also, somebody did manage to have a portable Mono runtime, but that was on Windows again.

Edited February 14, 2014 by Echo 8 ÉRÀ