Does HttpListener work well on Mono?

Question

I\'m looking to write a small web service to run on a small Linux box. I prefer to code in C#, so I\'m looking to use Mono.

I don\'t want the overhead of running a f

Answer 1

I am not sure why you want to look so deep into the hood. Even on Microsoft side, the documents about http.sys may not provide you really valuable information if you are using the .NET Framework.

To know if something works on Mono good enough, you are always supposed to download its VMware or VPC image, and test your applications on it.

http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html

Though Mono is much more mature than a few years ago, we cannot say it has been tested by enough real-world applications like Microsoft.NET. So please test out your applications and submit issues you find to Mono team.

Based on my experience, minor issues are fixed within only a few days, while for major issues it takes a longer time. But with Mono source code available, you can fix on your own or find out good workarounds most of the times.

Answer 2

Greetings, The HttpListener class in Mono works without much of a problem. I think that the most significant difference between its usage in a MS environment and a Linux environment is that port 80 cannot be bound to without a root/su/sudo security. Other ports do not have this restriction. For instance if you specify the prefix: http://localhost:1234/ the HttpListener works as expected. However if you add the prefix http://localhost/, which you would expect to listen on port 80, it fails silently. If you explicitly attempt to bind to port 80 (http://localhost:80/) then you throw an exception. If you invoke your application as a super user or root, you can explicitly bind to port 80 (http://localhost:80/).
I have not yet explored the rest of the HttpListener members in enough detail to make any useful comments about how well it operates in a linux environment. However, if there is interest, I will continue to post my observations.

chickenSandwich