mono-vbnc

[Jude DaShiell]

I've been doing a little programming with mono-vbnc on my home computer. 
For those that don't know mono-vbnc or vbnc for short is a vb.net compiler 
that runs in the command line environment in Linux and is also supposed to 
work in other flavors of Unix and on Osx for the mac.  For debian users 
it's a sid package.  There are some pretty good tutorials on 
http://www.java2s.com for vb.net and other platforms too.  Most of the 
worked examples work with vbnc that are in the console section but don't 
try using anything like MsgBox or InputBox functions in a console 
application or you'll get exceptions.  I learned how to put code in a 
program to tell the user this program requires windows and have it work 
correctly.  Right before the End Try statement and after the Catch ex As 
Exception statement.  I would really like to find out how to reverse that 
process, write a program which when someone ran it on windows put out a 
message that said "this program requires linux"  as an exception message. 
That way I have both bases covered. Something else I'm not understanding 
is how to write menu.vb such that the response is able to be used by 
classes methods and subroutines beyond menu.vb.  I've taken to splitting 
code up into its own files based on its purpose since what I'm working on 
is getting close to 6,000 lines long.  The programming I'm doing so I can 
learn and be able to do other programs at work.  I have a good inkey.vb 
subroutine that works well if anyone is interested though now too. 
Interesting thing is Console.Read() and Console.ReadLine() both require 
exception handling in vbnc at least.  No idea if that's the case with real 
visual studio yet though.