#Hello World!

Introduction

This repository contains the project files, source code and compiled binaries for a basic .net app that can be deployed through Resin.io.

The provided Dockerfile installs the mono-runtime package and .net 2.0 support libraries. That is all that's required to run a simple program like this. You will quickly find out though that by expanding the functionality in this sample program, that additional library packages are required. You can review our other examples on github for examples of running more sophisticated code.

For simplicity, we have put everything in one repository for this first example. That is, the entire source tree is in the repo, but you don't really need this for the deployment and it isn't used at runtime - it just makes for an easier sample set up. One of the more advanced examples will show how to use separate source and deployment repositories resulting in a better devops workflow.

Requirements

You should have

• Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi 2 with power, networking (wifi or ethernet), and a suitable SD card
• An installation of mono-complete on Windows, Apple OSX, or Linux (PC or on a Raspberry Pi). We'll use monodevelop to create, edit and compile our project. You can also use Visual Studio, though it is more complex to set up in a way that is mono-friendly. I may cover that in a later example. Theoretically, you could also use the msc command-line compiler, but explaining all of the options to get a correct compile is beyond the scope of this example.

Resin.io Setup

1. If you haven't got a Resin.io account, visit resin.io and sign up.
2. Start a new applicaton on Resin.io and follow the directions for your target device type to load the image onto your SD card.
3. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi, power it up and wait for it to connect to the internet and resin.io.
4. After about 10 minutes your new device should show up on your application dashboard.

Running the example code

You can deploy the unaltered example code just to see it run on your device. To do so, follow these steps... Below, we will walk through creating a new .net Hello World project from scratch.

1. Clone the HelloWorld repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/ResinIoDotNetExamples/Example-01-HelloWorld.git

Add the resin remote. You can find an example of this command and and a copyable link with your username and application name by clicking on your application on the resin.io dashboard. The information you need is at the top right next to the Need Help? button:

$ git remote add resin [email protected]:<yourUserName>/<yourApplicationName>.git

And finally push the code to your Raspberry Pi:

$ git push resin master

You should see a unicorn. Honest. Go to the resin.io dashboard; select your application; select your test device; and click on "Logs". At the end of the deployment process, you should see a simple "Hello World!" in the logs.

Reproducing the sample from scratch

1. Run monodevelop and create a new project. For simplicity, I created my project right in the deployment repository, but that's only because it makes it easier to package this as a sample. In practice, you will want a separate git repo for your source code, and then just copy the binaries into your deployment repo. You can run monodevelop on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) - it does not have to be run on a Raspberry Pi. For this sample, I worked from a PC running X86-64 Debian.
2. Create a new project. You should create a 'Console' project. The default console project template is a hello world program, so we don't have to edit any code.
3. We do have to change some options though. Firstly, right-click on the solution (not the project, but the top-level solution) and select 'options'.
4. Select 'Configurations' and then click on 'Debug|XXXXX'
5. Click on 'Copy' and enter the name 'Debug' and select a platform of 'Any CPU' It should look like this:
6. Do the same for 'Release'. That is, copy Release|XXXX and create a Release for the Any CPU platform.
7. Click OK to close the options dialog
8. Right click on the project node and select options again. This time, click 'Output'.
9. Change the Configuration to "All Configurations" and the Platform to "Any CPU" and set the output path to the directory that you want your output written into. In my case, I created a 'layout' directory. Note that this is the same directory that is mentioned in the ADD command in your Dockerfile. Using the output options (or post-compile Custom Commands) is how you can keep your source and deployment projects separate.
10. Close the options by clicking OK
11. Select Project->Active Configuration and choose the 'Debug' configuration. (That should be 'Debug' without any processor/platform specification. We need to be sure we create a platform agnostic binary using the Any CPU configuration that we just created)
12. Build the project
13. Commit your changes (including the newly created .exe file - make sure your .gitignore does not exclude .exe files!)
14. git push resin master
15. Unicorns and "Hello World!" as described above.

Key Points

• Your .net programs must either be developed on the same platform (a Raspberry Pi or Pi 2) or developed with a platform target of "Any CPU" which will generate platform-agnostic code. This is always my preferred option so that I do not need separate binary images for every target platform. The only time you cannot use Any CPU is when you are using PInvoke to call external native-code libraries with platform-dependent calling conventions.
• As you expand your code, you will need to change the Dockerfile to include more or different packages. This is covered in Example 2.

Diagnostics

If your .net program fails to launch or if it exits quickly and unexpectedly, you cannot use the resin.io terminal to diagnose the problem. The terminal only works when your application is running and if the application won't start then you are kind of stuck.

The main reasons for this sort of thing happening are:

• A bad path to your executable in your CMD. For instance, the ADD command either didn't copy what you thought it did, or your CMD command is referencing the wrong location. It can be hard to determine which is the real issue without being able to view the application in the terminal.
• Your .exe won't launch because of a missing library or assembly. That could mean that you need to update your Dockerfile to include more mono packages, or it could mean that you did not include all the needed assemblies in your deployment project.
• Your .exe launches, but an uncaught exception causes the exe to exit before you can attach a terminal session.

One way to ensure that you can attach a resin.io terminal session and poke around is to comment out this line in your Dockerfile:

CMD ["mono", "/app/hello/HelloWorld.exe"]

and add this line:

CMD ["bash"]

This will ensure that when you re-deploy your project that something is running and you can use the resin.io terminal to inspect the deployed environment (did everything end up where you thought it would?) and try to run your program from the command line and get more diagnostic information if/when it fails. An alternative is to start a script from the CMD directive and have the script drop into bash if your program fails to launch. You can use the script as a failsafe too, to restart your app if it ever exits unexpectedly, or use the script to launch a parallel watchdog process. We will be using scripts in later examples to give us access to hardware devices and do other useful things.