Starting ASP.NET5 on Linux, Part 2

by Vitor Fernandes — on  , 

Starting where we left off in Part 1, to get OmniSharp integration (tasks, IntelliSense and more) in Visual Studio Code, I need to install Mono first.

Following the official Mono instructions, I ran:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mono-complete ca-certificates-mono

Looks like running dnx/dnu inside Visual Studio Code is tied to Gnome Terminal, so I had to install that as well:

sudo apt-get install gnome-terminal

Finally, I was able to run press Ctrl + Shift + P and then dnx Restore Packages. That opened a terminal window to execute the dnu restore command. Took a while, but came back ok. If you get a message telling OmniSharp server is not running, you can do Ctrl + Shift + P and select Restart OmniSharp first.

After restoring the dotnet dependency packages, I was able to start the application by running dnx web on the command line. That starts up the Kestrel web server on http://localhost:5000 so if we open that in the browser, we get the default ASP.NET 5 web application.

Just to get everything else, I also did on the command line inside the project folder:

npm install

npm install bower --save-dev

./node_modules/.bin/bower install

Looks like the project relies on Bower being installed globally, but I don’t like that, so I added it to the package.json under the dev dependencies. Anyway, it looks like that is only necessary if running the project in Development mode, otherwise it will load the js libs from ajax.aspnetcdn.com.

I tried to run the project with the development configuration using dnx web --ASPNET_ENV development but it doesn’t seem to work out of the box, because the referenced bower components return a 404. It seems there is a task missing to copy all the necessary files into the lib folder under wwwroot. Let’s consider that one a WIP.

Also, I seem to get IntelliSense in the C# code, but it doesn’t auto-trigger when I type a ‘.’, I have to explicitly press Ctrl + Space. Other than that, it seems to work ok.

Setting up ASP.NET development on Linux is still not a smooth experience, but at least now it is possible and it will surely get better.

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