Using Mono to load and access simple DLL in Ubuntu

[jokubas11]

I am wondering if I am misunderstanding what Mono can do?

I am not a C# or .NET person, so bear with me. What I need is to be able to load an external (third-party) .DLL which was built to be used with .NET project (.NET 4.6 in particular).

The DLL File is: PE32 executable (DLL) (console) Intel 80386 Mono/.Net assembly, for MS Windows

What I did in the Windows was very simple: I have opened Visual Studio, added reference to the file and that's it, I was able to import it with 'Using Driver.dll;' right away and use it.

Now, I need to do the same on my Ubuntu 22.04 OS. From what I understand, I should be able to do this using Mono. I have installed Mono, successfully ran Hello World application, but now, I am lost at how am I supposed to use Mono to import my DLL file.

I want to remind, I do not need to do anything complicated, I just want to load that DLL and call 1 method, and that is it.

• I have installed Mono, and the Mono 'Compatibility' page says that it supports .NET 4.6, but how does it work exactly. When I run csc HelloWorld.cs, how will it know what to use and where.
• How do I exactly import the DLL? I saw Dllmaps page, but it was not helpful for me, as I understand, it maps given DLL files to already existing .so libraries, and I do not have that and I do not know anything about the internals of the .DLL, besides the few methods it contains. I also tried to -r:Driver.dll during build, but I assume that is not it, as I am not able to use it in code:

System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for '<Module>' threw an exception. ---> System.InvalidProgramException:

Please, could someone just point me to what should I do, if I want to just import one DLL and use its function in the same way I did very effortlessly in Visual Studio on Windows.

[andreygursky]

I just want to load that DLL and call 1 method, and that is it.

The code in [1] looks like a good minimal example. In [2] you can find details.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22261841/mono-embedding-get-monoclass-without-knowing-the-namespace
[2] https://www.mono-project.com/docs/advanced/embedding/