Project template for cross-platform library? (September 2017 edition)

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Hello there,

I’ve been playing around with MonoGame for a few days, but I’ve worked with C# for much longer. One thing I’d like to do is make a cross-platform library that I could share across all platform-specific specific MonoGame projects. I’ve been searching for answers on that, but many results were pretty old and don’t take into account new projects.

Generally, the minimum would be a project that would allow me to share various structures and elementary logic across projects. Ability to use common MonoGame classes such as Game (from MonoGame.Portable, maybe?) would be a bonus. If some classes would not be available, I guess I could work it around with interfaces and/or generics where needed, and supply implementations in platform-specific libraries?

I have installed MonoGame 3.6, and use it with Visual Studio Community 2017. I also installed the mobile development workflow, with all its Xamarin-related dependencies.

So far, to me, the most viable candidates seem to be Class Library (Legacy Portable) and Class Library (.NET Standard). I can’t find any other project template that seems “cross-platform,” but maybe I’m missing something.

Which options would you recommend? Thank you in advance. ^^

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Class Library (Legacy Portable) will disappear at some point and can be considered obsolete.
.NET Standard should be the one used, unfortunately this cannot reference Monogame which is a regular .Net Framework project.

The only option left would be Shared Project, but in practice you’ll loose intellisence, not practical at all.

Currently, you won’t get a cross platform setup, not until Monogame moves to .NET Standard itself.

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Thanks for the information.

I guess I’ll opt for .NET Standard + MonoGame-related interfaces, and the platform-specific implementations using MonoGame classes; hopefully, the latter shouldn’t require frequent changes, even if the base library has some internal changes.

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Here is what I would do:
1- Develop using a regular Desktop project.
2- When ready to deploy, create a Shared Project (.sh) and move the code there

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Any changes to MG to make it build as a .NET Standard lib will probably be accepted. I don’t think much is needed to get it to work.

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There is probably more work then you may think
This is what @harry-cpp has been working on right?

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Is there any update on MG supporting .NET Standard? I am faced with the same challenge of needing to use a shared library across Android, OpenGL and UWP. It’s currently a shared project, but I need it as a PCL / library in order to leverage internal / assembly accessibility.

Thanks.

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This might sound hacky (especially from another newbie to MonoGame) - but I’ve found a possible work-around, that seems to work under Android emulation, as well as cross-platform desktop.

Create a mono-game content pipeline extension project.
Delete out the default template code.
Treat the project as if it were a portable class library!
This seems to work for me.

With regards to the .NET Standard project - I tried this, and added it as a project reference, and also had code (because I’m experimenting) in a Shared project. From the shared project, I referenced a type in the .NET Standard project, and Visual Studio seemed happy to allow that. However, when I build the project, it failed. Perhaps an issue on my side. But regardless, the hi-jacking of the ContentPipelineExtension project worked for me more than once:-)