Using C# with Rider in Godot Engine on Ubuntu

I was inspired by the announcement of Slay the Spire 2 and Casey Yano's description of his experience with Godot Engine to investigate the C# bindings in Godot Engine. I've been using Godot Engine for years but only scripted it with GDScript. Like Yano, I prefer statically typed languages over dynamic ones, so this seemed worth a shot. I was introduced to Rider when I was doing C++ in Unreal Engine, and I found it to be an amazing IDE. This, combined with the availability of free academic licenses for people like me, made that my first stop for trying Godot's C# side.

Unfortunately, some of official documentation had me going in unproductive directions. That's why I am taking a moment here to share my quick notes about the experience. The most important thing I learned was not to bother with Mono: it is being phased out. If I had to do it all again from scratch, I would do something like the following.

• Install dotnet SDK using Microsoft's feed. I used version 8.0 and that seemed fine.
• Download and install JetBrains Rider. I did this with snap, which is how I've installed Android Studio for my Flutter work.
• The first time you run Rider, go to the settings and install the "Godot Support" plug-in.
• Of course, make sure you have the .NET version of Godot Engine, and tell Godot Engine to use Rider as its external "dotnet" editor.

That's it. Make a Godot Engine project, make some scene, and set it as the main scene to run. Then open the project in Rider, and everything else just worked. 

This was my trial case. At the time of this writing, it is the entirety of the C# code I have written for Godot Engine.

 using Godot;  
 namespace RiderTest;  
 public partial class World : Node2D  
 {  
   public override async void _Ready()  
   {  
     base._Ready();  
     await ToSignal(GetTree().CreateTimer(2.0), Timer.SignalName.Timeout);  
     GD.Print("Did it!");  
   }  
 }