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And yes it is officially supported, on the other hand Moonlight, the OSS Slilverlight implementation which is the only way to get it to work on Linux really has no backing from MS

No backing from Microsoft? You sure about that? I would call releasing their video codecs for use by Moonlight and publishing a covenant not to sue Moonlight users to be pretty far from "no backing".

Granted, this is Microsoft's version of playing nice so of course the whole covenant issue is really just a wedge to drive portions of the OSS community against each other, but I think it's difficult to assert that Adobe is being more open than Microsoft here.

When it comes down to it, both companies are going to be only as open as absolutely necessary to help promote their format. Of course hopefully SVG and HTML5 features like <video> and <canvas> tags etc. will make the whole point moot if all the non-IE browsers can gain critical mass to force Microsoft into supporting them. Then we'll see both companies in the position Sun is now with Java: wishing they had truly opened up their formats before it was 10 years too late.

Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't

Wrong. [...] Linux version: http://mono-project.com/Moonlight

He said 100% supported. At time of writing Moonlight is already a major version behind the Windows version of Silverlight. It certainly wouldn't let you watch baseball. It took a special effort from Microsoft for it to be able to watch the US presidential inauguration!

Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser

Wrong. The Wii only supports Flash 7. Almost all flash apps check for version 9 or 10 right off the bat so Flash is useless on the Wii.

Except that doesn't make the grand-parent's statement wrong.

Silverlight mobile is coming along quite nicely. [silverlight.net]

Well, for starters, that FAQ you linked to loaded so slowly it almost crashed my browser. Then it --very slowly -- drew a pop-in window demanding I install Silverlight. For a FAQ? I don't think so!

Secondly, I see Silverlight is only going to be available for Windows Mobile, which is a tiny piece of the embedded/mobile market. Where's the version for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian etc.?

Please research things instead of just making a bunch of stuff up and somehow getting +5 informative for it.

How about: you learn some manners and stop posting snarky, apologist, the-world-is-Microsoft-only bilge before criticising others? We don't like that sort of behaviour around here.*

* (pre-emptive strike: I must be new here!)

Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't

Wrong.
Mac version: http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
Linux version: http://mono-project.com/Moonlight

Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser

Wrong. The Wii only supports Flash 7. Almost all flash apps check for version 9 or 10 right off the bat so Flash is useless on the Wii.

[Silverlight can't compete with] Flash lite for mobile devices.

Wrong. Silverlight mobile is coming along quite nicely.

Please research things instead of just making a bunch of stuff up and somehow getting +5 informative for it.

Here's another one: Silverlight supports the h.264 standard for video.

Heck there's an OSS version of silverlight

Face it, something Microsoft has created is more "open" then its competition.

This "proprietary" argument is getting old.

Silverlight is an open-standard. While Microsoft doesn't actively develop a Linux client, they have collaborated with Novel to bring the Moonlight project to the Linux and other Unix/X11 platforms.

Granted, the Moonlight 2.0 implementation is behind Microsoft's implementation, with the Moonlight Roadmap indicating a planed release date of September 2009. While this is frustrating to end users and developers, I don't think it's fair to call Silverlight "proprietary".

This "proprietary" argument is getting old.

Silverlight is an open-standard. While Microsoft doesn't actively develop a Linux client, they have collaborated with Novel to bring the Moonlight project to the Linux and other Unix/X11 platforms.

Granted, the Moonlight 2.0 implementation is behind Microsoft's implementation, with the Moonlight Roadmap indicating a planed release date of September 2009. While this is frustrating to end users and developers, I don't think it's fair to call Silverlight "proprietary".

Does mono still have that absolutely asstastic garbage collector that is non-compacting?

You can make mono compatible with silly shit like publishing from visual studio which is useless in a production environment(unless your a complete idiot and let your developers publish directly). So while thats cool and useful for school kids working on class projects, there are far more important things that need to be fixed in mono than visual studio integration.

You might want to fix the garbage collector so the web server doesn't have to be restarted all the time due to running out of memory due to the shitty garbage collector. If I wanted to deal with memory fragmentation and relocation I'd write in C, without all the .NET overhead and just do it myself. Until mono has a garbage collector that doesn't suck complete ass, its worthless for any sort of production work.

I quote from: http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_ASP.NET

Why does the memory consumed by the Mono process keep growing?

Mono currently uses a conservative, non-moving, non-compacting garbage collector. This means that the heap is not compacted when memory is released. This means that applications can produce memory allocation patterns that will effectively make the process grow, just like C, C++, Perl, Python applications would.

Stop spending your time doing integration with visual studio and make the engine not suck ass. Mono is practically pointless if it doesn't do memory management for shit. All it is otherwise is a big fat massively bloated library loader with its own set of bugs. I'll just stick with C and ld if thats the case, or as I do now unfortunately, run windows asp.net web servers.

Is this part of the Microsoft embrace and extend/extinguish attack on linux via mono? Make it look pretty and inter operate with shit no one cares about on the surface (but sounds good in marketing copy), but under the hood its just like the MS JVM, broken intentionally with no hope of repair? You know what happened when Microsoft tried this? People just stopped using the MS version. If you're going to do that with mono, why the fuck even bother making it. Just come out and say 'MS is the way to go for .NET'. You're not going to upset any major projects or anything, they don't use Mono anyway, and all the kids in school can download the free MS shit for their little projects.

Excellent point- I hadn't even twigged to that

here is the real solution
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

I'd be curious to hear how well it works.

Their Silverlight 2 support's in alpha now, targeting beta in May and final in September.
http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap

Less than 11 months until the Vancouver WInter Olympics in Silverlight! I'm sure they'd appreciate any help in their Hackathon:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight2Hacking

I'd be curious to hear how well it works.

Their Silverlight 2 support's in alpha now, targeting beta in May and final in September.
http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap

Less than 11 months until the Vancouver WInter Olympics in Silverlight! I'm sure they'd appreciate any help in their Hackathon:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight2Hacking

And of course Parrot is Open Source. The clr is not and jvm was not at the time parrot was started.

This CLR is free software, but then it wasn't released until 2004.

Moonlight 2.0 builds that support Silverlight 2.0.

Mono has a hackathon going:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight2Hacking

Which lists the areas they're looking for help with.

One! Don't you feel dumb.
Two! Look at you.
Three! Don't you ever make jokes about me behind my back or else I'll stomp you into the ground

http://www.mono-project.com/news/archive/2009/Jan-13.html

-Rick

> Is .NET open source?

Microsoft's implementation is not, of course, but Novell's is: http://mono-project.com/Main_Page
and the spec is standardized: http://www.dotnetexperts.com/ecma/

> Has .NET been vetted by experts in the way open source projects like this will be?

Depends if you consider people like Herb Sutter and Anders Hejlsberg experts.

> Is .NET likely to ever be cross platform?

http://mono-project.com/FAQ:_General#Mono_and_Microsoft

> Is .NET for running x86 code?

No, and thats a good thing.

> Now I'm no expert and could be way off base but there seem to be some pretty major differences here....

> Is .NET open source?

Microsoft's implementation is not, of course, but Novell's is: http://mono-project.com/Main_Page
and the spec is standardized: http://www.dotnetexperts.com/ecma/

> Has .NET been vetted by experts in the way open source projects like this will be?

Depends if you consider people like Herb Sutter and Anders Hejlsberg experts.

> Is .NET likely to ever be cross platform?

http://mono-project.com/FAQ:_General#Mono_and_Microsoft

> Is .NET for running x86 code?

No, and thats a good thing.

> Now I'm no expert and could be way off base but there seem to be some pretty major differences here....

Not really. I can get the source for PHP and do what I like with it. Mono is not in the same category, by any stretch.

What do you mean? Mono is free software.

You don't know of any tools that let you use Silverlight under Linux? Let me introduce you to my little friend: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

No moon? Then where does Moonlight come from?

Actually, according to the Moonlight roadmap, they're planning a Moonlight 2.0 alpha version in March, and the first release version in September:

http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap

Odd that this is just now breaking on Slashdot. According to the Mono project's Moonlight page, the final version of Moonlight 1.0 was released Jan. 20 -- just in time for Linux users to accept de Icaza's invitation to watch President Obama's inauguration over the Internet via Silverlight.

To answer somebody's earlier question, Moonlight 1.0 is licensed under LGPL.

No.

x86 only... I was kinda hoping that this would lead to a PPC version, but I suspect not - they won't be "killing Flash" just yet.

For your former point--what exactly does this do that Java doesn't? The Java runtimes update, too. Microsoft's update faster, but what of it? They're free to download and freely documented. You have to spend some time learning more, but only if you actually want to use it. LINQ (which I don't really use, I'm not a fan of it) is there, but it does nothing that cannot be done just as easily the "old way". The .NET guys don't deprecate stuff in favor of the new hotness in these sorts of cases; the old ways still stay fine. You can even use the .NET 1.0 non-generic types if you really want to. And unlike Java, you don't have ArrayList and ArrayList, with no under-the-hood difference (seriously, the type checking in Java is complete balls when it comes to generics).

As for mobile platforms--depends on the platform. The iPhone (and the XBox 360, which is obviously not a mobile platform but has similar rules) doesn't let software run other software, so Mono recently rolled out static compilation. The Mono static compilation system either currently does or is in the process of (I'm out of the loop, I worked for them for GSoC and haven't kept in touch much since) importing code from Linker to strip out the excess library cruft in those images.

On other mobile platforms such as WinMobile, Microsoft has the .NET Compact Framework. It's slimmed down mostly by removing Windows-specific libraries like WinForms, which takes up the largest amount of space. The "core" libraries like System.* (not the subtrees, but the language itself), System.Core (which includes LINQ), System.Web, System.Net, etc. are all really quite small. (You won't fit it on a 4MB Flash ROM, but if you're trying to do that you already screwed up when picking your tool set. Nobody's saying Mono's the solution for everything!) You're not going to have the upper-level libraries like WinForms on your toaster, but having them would be silly. Similarly, XNA (.NET on the 360) doesn't have WinForms, but does have libraries specific to the interfacing with the XBox 360 when running there and DirectX when running on Windows; you can use standard .NET libraries that are not included in the XNA redist when developing on Windows, but in years of working with the framework I've never found myself accidentially doing that or wishing I could get away with it. It just doesn't come up.

You make good points, but they're pretty much not problems, as far as I (and most other .NET/Mono devs, it seems) can see.

Most people think of Qt as a GUI toolkit. They're not wrong, but that's like calling a Swiss Army Knife a "pocket knife." That's only one thing it does, and the characterization completely misses the point. Qt is an application framework. It fixes every gripe developers have with C++.

Qt promotes clean and well-developed code that is easily ported to Windows, X11 (Linux et al), Mac, and Embedded (Linux sans-X11). That's something even Java doesn't do well (have you ever tried porting between J2SE and J2ME? nothing works!), even disregarding the whole performance loss from the JVM emulation-like interpreting that goes on.

The LGPL relicensing of Qt coming this spring will change the entire programing language landscape. Nokia is moving in to crush Java. C#/.NET and it's mediocre OSS implementation in Mono aren't even on the radar.

I cite the LGPL announcement because that's the kiss of death, placing Qt firmly above GTK (GTK being an incidental casualty on the way to said crushing of Java). With Mono relying so heavily upon GTK#, that puts it behind the game already (the Qt# project is cited on the Mono page as completely dead).

Recall that Nokia is a phone company. They need not make money from the software. Freeing and promoting Qt (and getting it to supplant J2ME) merely feeds this primary function. And while they're at it, they're sweeping in a wonderful set of perks for software engineers in and out of the Free Software community, on both embedded platforms and desktops.

I agree. Very useful and not evil. This makes a simple and secure deployment and upgrade mechanism a viable option. It should have had broader publicity, though. Useful information can be found here:

What click-once does:

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-deploying-clickonce-ie-firefox.aspx#xamlbrowser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickOnce

An old FF clickonce addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1608

This is neither news nor a surprise. This addon first started appearing in summer 2008. Clickonce is years old. Firefox support is new.

Regarding mono support for click once, read http://www.mono-project.com/StudentProjects

" A ClickOnce implementation could be done ... Since CAS is not supported in Mono its usefulness would be somewhat limited. " (Mono doesn't implement code access security. Sandboxing and trust are key parts of ClickOnce. The apps are usually not fully trusted.)

haven't you heard of http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap ? The final version is due tomorow.
For those still complaining, the Presidential Inaugural Commitee also choosed YouTube, Twitter & Flickr as official broadcaster. Microsoft silverlight is only one way to watch it.

Silverlight is actually much easier to develop for then flash in many regards. Any .net developer can jump right into it. I would get used to Silverlight's existence and make it work for you rather then bemoan any industry successes it may have.

If you don't like being unable to use Silverlight on Linux, stop whining about it and contribute some time to the moonlight project. Show them how well the OSS development model works.

It's anticompetitive because it doesn't run on Mac PPC, Linux and FreeBSD? RFTS.

Firstly, Apple don't support Mac PPC anymore, why the fuck should anybody else?

Secondly, Linux and FreeBSD account for less than a single percentage point of the desktop market. Even so, you have people working on it.

Thirdly and finally, you don't have to watch at the official site. There's probably a hundred places online you could watch it. If you don't want to use Silverlight - don't.

Oddly enough Jan 20th is the official release date for Moonlight 1.0 The Linux implementation of silverlight. But only of the silverlight 1.0 spec. I wonder if 2.0 is really required.

moonlight roadmap

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

meant that. I somehow got to the parent mono download link instead. Feel free to mod parent down.

saving as an MS Office document does NOT preserve OOo's document formatting like it should.

There are only certain features that do not translate well. In particular, line breaks and tables I have had issues with, but avoiding the things that don't work well, which isn't much, shouldn't keep you from being able to follow the assignment. Also, for mac, OpenOffice really lags behind the other version the most. If you would like to have your computer back, consider Google Documents for simple stuff, or ThinkFree for fancier documents.

And while it seems really stupid, typically a user agent switcher can get you around the IE only stuff. If they are .NET applications, you need to get mono. If the school isn't going to help, you can do site specific documentation to help others. If you start getting significant hits, they may feel they are loosing control of their site and will try and adapt to the demand. Worse than sheep, they are extra lazy. These are non tech people running a big web site. Motivating them to even fix things for one specific platform is a pain, but I doubt it is as forelorn as you make it out to be. Further, don't worry about influencing the change yourself, just be the really annoying guy amongst many annoying people that will inspire future annoying people to eventually help them change. Just because they don't change to your request doesn't mean you didn't make an impact. Look at how class action lawsuits typically start :)

Winforms for Mono

Well, you can give Moonlight a try, from the second link, it seems they were working on supporting moonlight users. I know it may irk some to use proprietary codecs in linux, but worth a look.

How many of these have a competing commercial offering based on the same code?

StarOffice is not a competing with OpenOffice.org. StarOffice is OpenOffice.org with added indemnification.
Comparable offering can be found at least by Alfresco, MySQL (even pre-Sun) and Zimbra.
As for the Mono Project, see their licensing FAQ http://www.mono-project.com/Licensing:

Why does Novell require a copyright assignment? When a developer contributes code to the C# compiler or the Mono runtime engine, we require that the author grants Novell the right to relicense his/her contribution under other licensing terms. This allows Novell to re-distribute the Mono source code to parties that might not want to use the GPL or LGPL versions of the code. Particularly embedded system vendors obtain grants to the Mono runtime engine and modify it for their own purposes without having to release those changes back.

So actually, you can be sure that NOVL intends to offer "commercial offerings" of mono.

If you're really desperate, you could use Mono, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I'm curious why you say that? I am extremely new to programming anything but embedded stuff, but c# has been super easy to learn. I started about a month ago and i just released my first software utility to a few customers yesterday. I admit knowing very little about the alternatives, but c# works great for me. I'm not doing driver development or anything complex, just simple apps to access small databases etc, and c# shows no signs of being limited in anything i intend to do. I also played with Mono in Ubuntu and it seemed fine. Not as full-featured as VC# for windows, but not bad. If he's already learning c# as he said, it seems worthwhile to me to learn how to use mono.

check out their success stories here: http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono

-Taylor

Mono could make the transition very easy for you, depending on what your doing.

http://www.mono-project.com/

Part of the answer is the Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe). There is also a ".NET Runtime Optimization Service" which re-compiles assemblies after .NET is patched.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6t9t5wcf(VS.80).aspx

The Native Image Generator (Ngen.exe) is a tool that improves the performance of managed applications. Ngen.exe creates native images, which are files containing compiled processor-specific machine code, and installs them into the native image cache on the local computer. The runtime can use native images from the cache instead using the just-in-time (JIT) compiler to compile the original assembly.

Mono has something similar, but it looks like its not automatic:
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Runtime#Ahead-of-time_compilation

I'm guessing he meant "officially blessed" (which would be correct), not "given permission". The Mono team did not need Microsoft's permission to implement Moonlight. No one needs permission to implement a re-implementation of Silverlight as far as I'm aware.

Moonlight is a clean re-implementation of Silverlight based on the docs at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ Microsoft's test suites (which they have provided to us) and writing our own test cases to figure out how Silverlight handles certain cases where the docs were unclear (which we have tried to document on our own wiki: http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightQuirks - we've also included all of our own test suites in the moonlight source repository).

Since you develop it while being employed, are you sure you didn't sign any agreement not to moonlight

Moonlight? Are there even phones that run Silverlight yet?

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

actually, iirc, mono is compatible with all of .NET 2.0 and quite a bit of 3.5, so they aint that far behind, see: http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General

The first lockout was when Microsoft abandoned the Visual BASIC 6.0 and under platform (Classic Visual BASIC) in exchange for Visual BASIC.Net 2002 and above. But many developers rebelled and stuck with VB 6.0 (I get many contractors and headhunters asking me to train programmers for VB 6.0 programming on Windows XP and under.)

Now this new platform will lock out the Visual Studio.Net 200X developers in exchange for the Cloud Framework.

I told former employers that it is better to just rewrite programs from scratch rather than try to convert code from VB 6.0 to VB.Net, but they didn't believe me. Then after they fired me for being sick on the job they found out I was right as they ran into a lot of issues and bugs with Visual BASIC.Net as I told them on my reports of it.

Might as well screw Microsoft as Microsoft has screwed developers at least three times now. Then screw Microsoft by adopting Python, Java, Ruby, Perl, Free Pascal, Delphi, or some other competing platform to Visual Studio and Cloud Windows Azure.

I would really like to see Linux or BSD Unix develop their own cloud computing that runs from the web to counter what Microsoft is doing.

I got a theory that using Novell Mono would be a gateway language for Windows developers to switch to, before switching to something else and develop VB.Net code in Mono for Linux, BSD Unix, Solaris, Mac OSX, etc, and leave Microsoft altogether and screw them for screwing developers too many times.

...call me again when Mono has an implementation.

I couldn't find your phone number, but here you go -- Mono project's Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight.

I found his phone number.

Otherwise, Microsoft would be releasing a technology that will only work reliably on Windows and shun the other major platforms.

The version that Microsoft released works on Windows and Mac OS X.
The "Moonlight" project is the version for "for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems"

And the other major platforms are ... ?

...call me again when Mono has an implementation.

I couldn't find your phone number, but here you go -- Mono project's Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight.

Will I be able to watch it without stupid Silverlight? It'd be nice to be able to watch from my Linux box :-(

What error message did Moonlight give, either when you built it from source to get the media codecs[1] or when you tried to run it?

[1] From the page: "These builds do not include media codecs (video or audio), for that, you must currently build Moonlight from source code."

We are getting ready for our first beta of Moonlight 1.0, which will map to Silverlight 1.0, you have a few options to get it running:

(a) Wait until our official Beta launch, and it will contain an easy-to-install plugin. Click install, restart browser, you are done.

(b) You can use it today if you build from our source code, it is published here: http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

(c) Repositories like Packman have RPMs that you can install for various distributions that you can install today.

We will be using Microsoft's Media Pack for Linux, which is a licensed version of the media codecs, binary drivers provided by Microsoft. This has the advantage that the media companies that own the patents on codecs have been paid for (MPEG-LA consortium and others).

For those of you that live in a country where software/machine patents are not enforced (media patents are enforced in Europe, contrary to popular lore) or those that just want to stick it to the man, you can build Moonlight with the open source FFMPEG media codecs.

Support for Silverlight 2.0 will ship in preview form in December.

There is Moonlight. In the end I'd rather none of these plugins, but if I have to choose, my preference is Flash. Adobe have shown support for multiple platforms, while Microsoft is pretty much delegating that to Mono, which is perpetually playing catch-up.

The Microsoft Media Pack will be a product distributed by Microsoft that includes a license to the various media codecs for video and audio and will be available from Microsoft's web site for Moonlight to consume.

That does not sound like open source to me!

Moonlight is free and open-source, and isn't going anywhere. MS has offered technical reviews and support to moonlight developers, and you'll likely see moonlight in your native x64 firefox before Flash.