At work I had to make changes to a legacy .NET Framework application, but since I primarily work on a Mac I thought I'd try out Mono Project and work with Jetbrains Rider, something I tought would be an easy task as I've been using Jetbrains Rider for .NET applications for quite some time now. The problem was that there were not articles about this, which is why I decided to make a little guide.

Step #1: Installing Mono Project

There are two primary ways of installing Mono Project, my first thought was to install it through Homebrew, it might work just fine for you, but a very important component of the Mono Project installation is that MSBuild should be bundled with it, something which didn't happen when I installed it through Homebrew.

Let's go ahead and install it through the official binary straight from Mono Project themeselves. You can download it from here.

Step #2: Setting up Rider

Now let's setup Jetbrains Rider to work with Mono Project. Start by opening your .NET Framework project and navigating to settings.

Inside of the settings navigate to Build, Execution, Deployment > Toolset and Build under Toolset we're just interested in the Mono executable path and MSBuild version fields.

Mono executable path:

/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/bin/mono-sgen64

MSBuild version:

/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Version/Current/lib/mono/msbuild/15.0/bin/MSBuild.dll

After that has been set, your Toolset settings should look something like this:

You should be all setup now, just rebuild your projects and it should be working! Hope this helped!