Slashdot Mirror

You must have very strong ethics my friend. Perhaps too strong?

Like it or not, you will at some time or another support Microsoft in this industry. They're just too big and too pervasive to ignore and still put food on the table. (By your logic, SAMBA and WINE should not exist for Linux, since they support products from an un-ethical company, but I digress.)

Realistically, Microsoft isn't going away any time soon - if ever. It takes quite a while to fritter away $40 Billion, and that's just the war chest. IMHO, we can either continue to tilt at windmills or we can be more constructive and try to modify the beasts behaviour. If Microsoft were to stop being so arrogant and paranoid at the same time, they would likely be a pretty cool company (Aside: Look at what's happened to the stuffiest corp of all time - Big Blue). Then, these moral dillemas won't de-rail us from getting our jobs done.

BTW, I'm not saying you should tone down or compromise your ethics in any way - I'm saying that you should try to find more constructive ways to uphold them than possibly hanging your future out dry. We need advocates, not martyrs.

God bless, and best of luck to you - I hope you make a wise decision.

Soko

• Build is complicated.
  
• Some people were under the *wrong* impression that GNOME was slower than KDE. Later on, we benchmarked both, and noticed that GNOME is faster, and smaller than KDE (GNOME 2.2 vs KDE 3.1). So that is not really an issue, but a bad reputation we had from GNOME 1.4
  
• Integrated file manager/browser. This one is the only thing that people have repeatedly said they find confusing about GNOME.
  

• Build is complicated.
  
• Some people were under the *wrong* impression that GNOME was slower than KDE. Later on, we benchmarked both, and noticed that GNOME is faster, and smaller than KDE (GNOME 2.2 vs KDE 3.1). So that is not really an issue, but a bad reputation we had from GNOME 1.4
  
• Integrated file manager/browser. This one is the only thing that people have repeatedly said they find confusing about GNOME.
  

Go to the official Mono site and have a look at the modules being developed that are a direct copy of a Microsoft technology. Here is a quick list:

• The CLR runtime
• C#
• VB
• XML libs
• Data libs
• Drawing libs
• Web libs
• Windows.Forms
• Enterprise Services
• Soap
• ASP.NET
• ADO.NET
• ... and so on

Of these only the CLR and C# are ECMA standards. All the rest (with very minor exceptions, perhaps) are essentially proprietary Microsoft technologies and are subject to corporate protection in one form or another.

Now, whether such a protection is justified or not is a completely different question, which unfortunately is largely irrelevant when taking into account that in litigation money is what counts most.

In the long run, Mono depends on the good will of Microsoft in many ways, including, but not limited to the lack of litigation. See Wine and the current state of Samba, for a quick example. In the mean time, Mono brings ligitimacy to a major Microsoft technology and helps MS with its marketing, which is hardly the best thing that an OSS project can do.

Of course, it is entirely within Ximian's rights to do that, but it is our right not to like what they do at all.

Also From Mono's FAQ: Question 666

I don't see a question 666 in the official Mono FAQ page.

Thus ensuring that Microsoft does not "cut off our air supply"

The word "air" does not appear in the Mono FAQ page.

I'm assuming that the parent comment was original humor, but it had me there for a second. Good job.

Mono does alot more than just ASP.NET it also does Windows Forms.NET and all the other essential class libraries. So .NET already has good coverage on the Linux platform.

Development of support for .NET on OS X is already underway so there's a likilhood .NET will soon offer cross platform solutions for Windows, Linux and Mac which is pretty much the entire desktop market.

As long as that platform runs Windows.

http://www.go-mono.com/winforms.html

Do five more minutes of work and you'll discover Mono.

I'm sure as soon as the Mono project gets far along enough you'll be able to run it under Linux, FreeBSD, etc. That's the whole goal of Mono, to provide an open-source version of the .NET common language runtime environment so it can run on other systems. This is actually something Microsoft touts as a benefit of .NET -- portability. Except, in their eyes, you write one piece of software and it runs on WinXP, WinCE, Win64, etc.

You might want to give Mono for your .NET projects (libraries thereof at least.) I'm sure they will have better support for Mozilla :) E

My experience with .Net is limited to playing around with mono a bit. It strikes me that this is one area where the presence of mono could be very useful. If Windows .net produces html & javascript that isn't cross-browser compatible developers can either switch over entirely to mono or perhaps just use the equivalent mono dll ( System.Web.dll? ) (which I presume will be made to produce cross-browser html & javascript) in place of the Microsoft one.

seems they also thought about this
from http://go-mono.com/faq.html#licensing
Patents Question 122: Could patents be used to completely disable Mono (either submarine patents filed now, or changes made by Microsoft specifically to create patent problems)? No. First, its basic functional capabilities have pre-existed too long to be held up by patents. The basic components of Mono are technologically equivalent to Sun's Java technology, which has been around for years. Mono will also implement multi-language and multi-architecture support, but there are previous technologies such as UCSD p-code and ANDF that also support multiple languages using a common intermediate language. The libraries are similar to other language's libraries, so again, they're too similar to be patentable in large measure. However, if Microsoft does patent some technology, then our plan is to either (1) work around it, (2) chop out patented pieces, (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless. Not providing a patented capability would weaken the interoperability, but it would still provide the free software / open source software community with good development tools, which is the primary reason for developing Mono.

Mono is doing very well indeed as a platform independent of .NET or the tie-ins that Microsoft is traditionally associated. There are already several independent Gtk# applications popping up and the ASP.NET implementation is showing real promise. There's a new page of screenshots here. The Gtk# debugger and documentation browser are fairly complete and have been developed in a minimal time-frame thanks to C#. Other pages worth looking at are gsirc and Platano.

Basically, what these pages show is that Mono is less like Wine and more like a complete new development environment for Linux that also has cross-platform ties. There's lots of innovation going on in the Mono community and that's filtering down into projects like GNOME and KDE through Gtk# and Qt#, for example. I say it's all good.

It would take a really strong case to change the status quo.

I believe that test case is going to be called the Mono project. If this is successful, I believe you're going to see xplat Windows.Forms and then code you make in VS.NET is going to work right nearly anywhere.

Keeping the status quo means falling behind. I think Sun will give GUIs at least one more shot.

Do note that you can build whatever you want on top of AWT (that's what Swing does, as you implicitly said), and it doesn't have to be Swing.

You know, judging from the recent work of the Mono team, I think I wouldn't find that absurd at all.

You bet!

Pascal is good in some areas:

• Pascal is very "neat" (except for pointer syntax, which has been fixed in ObjectPascal/Delphi).
  
• It's fast, especially in development time.
  
• It's well known and it had been used widely.
  
• thus, there is alreasy too much source code and binary components readily available (anybody remembers SWAG?).
  
• It's strongly typed (not an advantage for evertone, though).
  
• It's object oriented and has a very nice syntax (compare and avarage MFC code with a Delphi one and see).
  
• It's portable (thanks to GNU Pascal and FreePascal, the latter is much better).
  
• There are already a very sufficient library support for FreePascal (if anything is missing, you can import C libraries easily).
  
• It's good for database programming (i do not know why, but some vendors used to mix SQL in Pascal or vice versa).
  
  However something is missing (except for A^[13] syntax): the applications. There are too many tools (IDEs, RAD tools, libraries). There are many DOS and Windows apps, but it's not used in Linux, yet.
  
  And here some ideas for using pascal...
  
  
  • mod_pascal: OO programming for Apache, with use of existing data access and XML objects.
    
  • server console: anybody remembers Netware console? Instead of the regular shell, we can start the servers in a special console application, probably using TurboVision or similar.
    
  • gui applications: Delphi is a very nice and rapid way to deploy GUIs, with Kylix and lazarus, we can start a gui movement (especailly frontends to various Linux software), until mono is ready.
    
  • marketing: Kylix is there, but not much used. Why not advertise it as a movement path for developers (MFC -> VCL -> CLX -> Linux).
    
  
  
  But I guess we need to finish lazarus first :)

The original article generated an exceptional collection of interesting and helpful of responses. In this section, I'll run down the important points people made.

Note: This is a duplicate of a new section I added to the review; I'm posting it here for posterity.

An overwhelming number of people suggested that I include results for IBM JDKs -- and I have. In fact, I've added results for Sun JDK 1.3.1_06, IBM JDK 1.4.0, and IBM 1.3.1 RC3. Adding these JVMs made a significant difference in the results, cutting runtimes in half. On the other hand, almabench runs as an infinite loop with Sun's 1.3.1 JVM (it starts, but never finishes). Note that I recompiled almabench with the corresponding javac for each JDK, so the JVMs were executing code generated by their corresponding compiler.

The problem with Java's performance is not my code or my lack of Java skills -- what real problem is that Java 1.4 is slow. Both the Sun and IBM JVMs lost significant performance in the move from 1.3.1 to 1.4, whether due to a new language requirement or other factors. My faith in Java is severely shaken when applications lose significant performance by upgrading to the current release of Java.

Java 1.4 added many new features to the language and packages; however, changing from version 1.3 to 1.4 should not double run-times! Nor am I comforted by the problems of Sun's 1.3.1 server JVM.

Given the nature of the problem, my conclusions about Java stand (albeit slightly softened). By Sun's own definition, JDK 1.3.1 is obsolete; the fact that it performs better than the most current JDK is indicative of a serious problem with Sun's improvements to their language. Since Java 1.4.1 is what Sun is promoting, so that is what I base my conclusion on. I can say that IBM's product is superior, and have already set it is my default JDK. It's no wonder Sun is upset about IBM usurping Java -- IBM is producing better tools.

Some people asked if my Java results were biased by the amount of time it takes to load the JVM. I've tested several empty and near-empty applications; a Hello, world program, for example loads and runs in less than 2/10ths of a second -- hardly significant. The start-up time increases with the number of imports -- but almabench.java imports only one small class package, java.math.*, which (in my tests) does not impose measurable overhead.

I did not include any commercial Java compilers. Most, like the oft-cited Excelsior JET, are Windows-only; this article is about Linux. I don't benchmark Visual C++ or C# for the same reason (although I will look at Mono and C# some time in the future). The free version of Borland C++ does not include a complete optimizer, so I don't think it fits in this review.

How do I know that the programs are producing the correct output? Each program includes code to display results; I run the programs with I/O to ensure that all calculations are being performed, then I comment out any header inclusions, imports, and print statements for actual testing.

How am I timing the results? With the Linux time command. Table 3 reports the real value reported by time (the elapsed time of execution.) Embedding timers in the actual code is fraught with problems; for example, each language implements different time scales and abilities. I'm sure someone will tell me that time is full of problems too, but it works for me and is consistent across all programming languages.

Amid the barrage of Java-related comments, a few people actually noticed the Fortran code. I am looking at other Fortran compilers for future updates. As for GNU g77 -- I wrote the code in Fortran 95 because I find Fortran 77 to be annoying. I wrote piles of Fortran 77 back in my CDC and VAX days, but these days I'm writing for environments where Fortran 95 is more appropriate. Believe it or not, Fortran 95 is a very clean, orderly language that eliminates many Fortran 77 idiosyncrasies while adding features important for high-performance coding.

I love c#, i hate microsoft.. there is a dilema(sp?) there.

Now i can use something as easy as c# and be more and more m$ free.

I love the mono project (http://www.go-mono.com) but we all know sooner or later m$ is going to blow them out of the water in court :(

This is so similar to c#! I love it. C++ and C are too time consuming, Java blows ass, c# is a happy medium. C# is the perfect mix of RAD and Power IMHO.

Don't laugh. It's actually starting to happen.

It almost seems like blasphemy to be able to compile and run Visual Basic in a linux environment. Yikes! What is this interoperable world coming to? What next, a paperclip for emacs? ;)

Well, having ASP.NET is very convenient to move applications and components from Windows and deploy them on Linux or Unix systems. So I think that this is a plus on its own.

In terms of choices, I have to admit that I personally am more of an old school strongly-typed kind of person, and I like programming more with a language that I understand like C#. There is nothing wrong with PHP or Perl, but I feel a bit insecure with them. Like when you have to order water in a restaurant, and you do not want to look cheap, so you end up asking for `bottled water' even when you are trying to not spend a lot of money [1].

Mono and .NET offer a very interesting crossroads: the possibility of sharing components and existing classes independently of the language that was used to create it.

I strongly believe that scripting languages are great for quickly building web solutions, and I would love to see more work between the PHP (and other scripting communities) and Mono. We are certainly interested in helping out.

For instance, the Mono runtime is easily embeddable, it could be used in existing systems with ease: for example, allow any language but use the PHP API to write web pages is one option (check the link for a few more samples and the tutorials), or hosting any programming language on Apache (as its done with the Apache/Mono module mod_haydn.

Miguel.

[1] Although as you grow older, you become more cynical, and you just tell the waiter `Get me a glass of the cheapest form of water you have'.

An old version of the VB compiler is included in the release, but we did not have time to integrate the new VB compiler patches from Marco, but hopefully those will make it into the next release. There are screenshots of it in windows and with Gtk#.

SharpDevelop does require Windows.Forms, if you are interested in getting this superb development environment running on Linux with Mono (it includes Intellisense), you could help with the Windows.Forms porting effort

Miguel.

An old version of the VB compiler is included in the release, but we did not have time to integrate the new VB compiler patches from Marco, but hopefully those will make it into the next release. There are screenshots of it in windows and with Gtk#.

SharpDevelop does require Windows.Forms, if you are interested in getting this superb development environment running on Linux with Mono (it includes Intellisense), you could help with the Windows.Forms porting effort

Miguel.

As a previous poster said, albeit sarcastically, it seems odd that you've put up with Visual Basic with its numerous flaws and 'lock in' attitude for so many years you're now looking to bail out when the development platform your company has chosen has improved dramatically.

My personal opinion is that .NET is a great development environment. As a long standing C/C++/Java developer (I hate to admit to VB in public), it's taken me a very short time to get to grips with the Framework - the language you use is largely irrelevent, but I have to admit I went for C# - which is the major bulk of any learning effort required in getting up to speed with .NET

Other posters have also pointed out that there are Open Source efforts underway to port .NET to Linux (Mono and DotGNU

Make no mistake; the Redmond behemoth is not going to let .NET just curl up and die. If I were you, I'd use it as a stepping stone to your Open Source ideals. Ahh, how delicious is *that* irony?

Sorry, the link should go here.

Gotta preview next time.

I work in a Microsoft only shop. We are an integrator that develops systems for manufacturers. The single most important technology we deal with are OPC (OLE for Process Control) servers, which are a Windows only technology. With .NET, I can create a client to connect to the OPC server, get the status of the machine, and relay that information to our MES and ERP systems.

Once Mono reaches a full, stable release, I'll be able to switch over to developing under Linux. Mono will allow me to interoperate with the components on a Windows application server, which we will still need to run the OPC server, but the client will now be able to run on any machine.

Until Mono is ready, I'll continue to use Ant, Vim, and Visual Studio.

I hope mono is able to port it eventually.

--Me

Can't wait to see C# go the same path...

You mean like Mono and DotGNU?

Speaking as a Linux lover, I don't mind using .NET. In fact, I would encourage more people to write C# code, and to test it against Mono. Then report any bugs and/or contribute new classes.

Microsoft is switching from a proprietary file format, to XML, and the first 100 comments are all flaming MS. WTF does it take to make you people happy?

They've already shown with .NET that they can make an entire programming framework (and at least 3 assocated languages) into an open standard and even have them ratified by the ECMA and maybe even ISO. Because of this people have already managed to port Perl, Python and many other languages to this framework before it even came out of beta! The guys at Ximian have even managed to port quite a bit of the framework itself as part of the Mono Project.

So perhaps instead of perpetually slating Microsoft, you could get off your arse and do something useful instead.

Nick...

I suppose that you haven't heard about a little thing called the Mono project The point of .net is to allow applications to work anywhere. IE. Windows, MacOS, SmartPhones, and yes, Linux. We should waste less time hating everything Microsoft puts out and spend more time realizing that it may be possible to get along.

Perhaps it will be run under Ximian's mono?

Using Mono, I compiled this:

class test {
static int Main(string[] args) {
return 42;
}
}

I got:

% mcs test.cs
[00:000] - FindMembers timer (used 0 times)
[00:003] - TypeContainer.FindMembers timer (used 23 times)
[00:014] - MemberLookup timer (used 2 times)
[00:000] - CachedLookup timer (used 1 times)
[00:031] - Cache init (used 2 times)
[00:001] - Misc timer (used 1 times)
0 - Find members
2 - Member cache
0 - Misc counter
Compilation succeeded
% ls -l test.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 fn wheel 2048 Oct 20 00:07 test.exe
% mint test.exe
% echo $?
42
%

Now, technically, this test.exe (which is, in reality, a binary of sorts) should run on Windows as well, as long as you have the .Net infrastructure in place.

Open Source IDE
You can use CVS for .NET development and you can use any database also.
The only point you have is the middle tier, and with mono and dotGNU, becoming more complete, this point crumbles away also.

No.

Have you heard of Mono?

Aggie is an open source news aggregator. Basically, you give it the URL to your favorite RSS feeds, it downloads and parses them, and then builds a web page with the headlines. The really nice thing about it is that it supports RSS autodiscovery, so in many cases, you can simply provide the URL to the site itself, and it will find the RSS feed for you.

It does not use the GPL, but its license is considered open source by the OSI definition.

Another caveat is that it is written in C# and thus requires the .NET framework to run, so it isn't portable to other operating systems (not yet, at least). The upside is that the C# source code is fairly easy to follow, even for a dunce like me.

I hope I am wrong. But should we expect something different for Mono ? Is microsoft not going to screw them when and if .Net and Mono get bigger ? I respect Miguel so much for what he did and does for Gnome. But from the announcement of Mono I always had a bad feeling. I DO NOT trust microsoft, and I think I have reasons why.

MCS is an open source self hosting c# compiler for linux that doesn't need any microsoft libraries

The opportunity GNOME and KDE have with this agreement is huge: write a unified GUI API equivalent to Windows Forms, with both Gtk and Qt backends.

In fact, if you read the Winform plans document at the mono website, you will see that the plan is to support multiple back ends for System.Windows.Forms.

You should vote for Mattias Ettrich. I'm suprised that he hasn't gotten the award while miguel has.

All miguel does it prop up proprietary companies with software that benefits the adoptions of said companies' new technologies

As Gtk# continues to mature, it looks like the Mono project will soon be able to provide a powerful cross-platform Java-like envoronment complete with a modern object-oriented language, C#, that has proved so popular in business and enthusiast circles alike, without any of the vendor tie-in associated with Java.

The above poster have gotten a 4 insightful, but rather should have a "-1 Dreadfully biased troll", for being way more biased than what he is bashing for being biased.

What the f*** is so insightful about bashing language on the basis of it being high-level and created by Microsoft?

C, C++, Java and C# all looks like nice languages, and even if you are sceptical you should base languages on its merits, and not who created it.

I'm really paranoid about Microsoft, I run a small norwegian Linux site, and I'm a Linux user, but this is just BS.

Besides, reasonable C-coders might prefer to code in C, but won't dismiss C# or Java as some sort of "Mickey Mouse"-language just because it is high-level. Some times you need the power of C, sometimes you just want rapid development without the hassle.

There are at least enough C-coders that think C# is great, to create Mono.

And since it only runs on Windows, hence x86, I need to produce bytecode why?

Really?

In a one sentence summary of the difference between Java and C#: C# is like Java with convenient C++ extensions such as structs, enumerations, multiple inheritance, but also with some of the problems of C++ like unsafe code.

There's of course much, much more to it like the .NET framework's focus on web services, XML and other things.

What I personally like most with C# is this:

- Isn't a "layer" above another language, like C++. Clean.
- The ease of use of Java with much of the power of C++.
- Many annoying shortcomings in Java are fixed while preserving invaluable support for things like garbage collection.

I'm not advertising VS.NET by this in any way. Always remember that *nix (and Windows!) users can go with the Mono project to get the C# language with platform independence, while still not supporting Microsoft if that's a concern. ;-) Unless they get tempted by the devil so to speak and switch to VS.NET of course. :)

or Here for a very-nearly compatable version of dot net. In fact near enough to actually learn C# on linux.

How is this an insightful post? Because you can't figure out that MS has released a _FREE_ C# compiler for both Windows and FreeBSD? Sure, the FreeBSD one is just for non-commercial use, but then you have Mono.

Since you seem to be having troubles:
.NET Framework for Windows

Rotor - C# for FreeBSD

Fully working Linux C# compiler

Just incase you want some education so you don't sound uninformed next time

Now from my point of view, going from Visual Basic (or C++) to C# isn't that bad. I mean, it's all just MS product crap anyways. As many other informed readers pointed out, any programmer worth their salt won't be boggled by different languages. I personally used 5 to 10 different languages throughout school. Some are suited to things better than others, but let's face it: Teaching someone to use C# for a single 4-month *introductory* course is not going to make much of a difference anywhere in their future (if they are any good).

And besides Linux has a C# compiler also.

I hope that MS giving U(W) money means that the school won't bother alumni with donation pledges anymore :)

If "ease of use for beginners" was so important, why not choose Java or Python? Both of those languages are a) cross platform, b) have free advanced IDE's for development available.

The sad fact of the matter is that Microsoft invests a hell of a lot more money in Universities now than just about any other company out there. In response, Universities will toe the line. Luckily, most students are smart enough not to fall for it. I expect this announcement will result in a whole hell of lot more volunteers for Project Mono.