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Microsoft released .net as a standard to get better support for it. It doesn't hurt them in any way because .net isn't all that revolutionary (nice, but not revolutionary). Avalon is just the Windows-specific API for creating rich UIs (like cocoa# will be for the mac). Avalon is Microsoft's way of making sure Windows will stay the preferred environment for .net development. You can still code GTK# or cocoa# applications. You could even code winforms if you want.

If the community were smart, they would take Miguel's suggestion, and start on a competitive stack. Perhaps something that extends SVG to allow binding to .net and a friendlier syntax for reusable components.

Check out the The Mono Handbook for tutorials and general getting started instructions. It's still a work in progress, so many sections are still quite empty. Another resource you should familiarize yourself with is the MSDN developer documentation for most of the core .NET API, it includes a lot of examples.

I also recommend you check out the standard GTK+ tutorial. A lot of it is still directly applicable to GTK# and it's more complete than most GTK# only tutorials. If you're already familiar with GTK+, Glade# for Rapid Development will help you get up to speed with Mono.

First, Mono already supports a lot of the stuff coming in Whidbey (generics for example).

Second, even if Microsoft killed their .NET effort tomorrow it wouldn't change the fact that we now have a kick-ass development platform for Linux. Everybody needs to take a look at the two software stacks of Mono.

Wether Mono has feature parity with MS .NET is not the most important thing, neither is supporting Windows.Forms. Mono is good enough to stand on its own, as the next generation Linux development platform. Interoperability with Windows is just sugar on the top. Where do you see the Linux desktop being five years from now? I truly hope we're not still at the time writing our applications in C, as we do for the GNOME desktop now. Unless Sun steps up to the plate to release their JVM under a open soruce license, Mono is pretty much our only hope to modernize our development environment in any reasonable timeframe.

Of course, some will say we've already got Python, or Ruby or whatever. But I say I want to program Python in Mono.

- when he need to consult microsoft when developing it further...

I haven't tried it yet, but have you considered running Pop Goes the GMail with Mono? PGtGM is written in .NET, which should run with the Mono implementation of the .NET framework. A good alternative if you want to stick with Linux...

mono-debugger

I have always felt that Linux is a nice operating system (for hobbyists and geeks), but there are some areas where it is seriously lacking, especially when compared to its main competitor, Microsoft Windows.

* File sharing. Windows has long been superior when it comes to making large
amounts of files available to third parties. Even early versions of Windows
automatically detected and made available all directories thanks to the built in
NetBIOS-powered file sharing support. But Microsoft has realized that this
technology is inherently limited and has added even better file sharing support
to its Windows XP operating system. Universal Plug and Play will
make it possible to literally access any file, from any device! I think
universal file sharing support needs to be built into the Linux kernel soon.

* Intelligent agents. With innovations like Clippy, the talking paperclip and Microsoft Bob, Microsoft has always tried to make life easier
for its customers. With Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft has built a framework for developers to create even smarter agents. Especially popular agents include "Sircam", which automatically asks the users' friends for advice
on files he is working on and the "Hybris" agent, which is a self-replicating
copy of a humorous take on "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves" (the real story!).
Microsoft is working on expanding this P2P technology to its web servers. This
project is still in the beta stage, thus the name "Code Red". The next versions
will be called "Code Yellow" and "Code Green".

* Version numbers. Linux has real naming problems. What's the difference
between a 2.4.19 and a 2.2.17 kernel anyway? And what's with those odd and even
numbers? Microsoft has always had clear and sophisticated naming/versioning
policies. For example, Windows 95 was named Windows 95 because it was released
in 1995. Windows 98 was released three years later, and so on. Windows XP
brought a whole new "experience" to the user, therefore the name. I suggest that
the next Linux kernel releases be called Linux 03, Linux 04, Linux 04.5 (OSR1),
Linux 04.7B (OSR2 SP4 OEM), Linux 2005 and Linux VD (Valentine's Day edition).
Furthermore, remember how Microsoft named every upcoming version of Windows
after some Egyptian city? Cairo, Chicago and so on. I think that the development
kernels should be named after Spanish cities to celebrate Linux' Spanish
origins. Linux Milano or Linux Rome anyone?

* Multi-User Support. This has always been one of Microsoft's strong sides,
especially in the Windows 95/98 variants, where passwords were completely
unnecessary. Microsoft has made the right decision by not bothering the user
with a distinction between "normal" and "root" users too much -- practice has
shown that average users can be trusted to act responsibly and in full awareness
of the potential consequences of their actions. After all, if your operating
system doesn't trust you, why should you trust it? (To be fair, Linux is making
some progress here with the Lindows distribution, where users are always running as root.)

With Windows XP, Microsoft has again improved multi-user support. Not only
does Windows XP come with a larg

Umm, you obviously haven't look at mono that carefully have you? The JIT also exists for PowerPC linux and S390 linux, in addition to Solaris SPARC, PowerPC MaxOSX and Linux x86. There is an interpreter for a whole slew else.

As for the class library, that's just FUD that you're spewing. Yes they have chosen to use Wine for Windows.Forms, no use in reinventing the wheel here for a tiny population. But all the applications the parent of your post mentioned don't use windows.forms. In fact, the engine is flexible enough that Miguel got MonoDevelop (the IDE they've ported from SharpDevelop) to run on his Mac under OSX. See his blog entry for more information.

I wrote a fairly complex simulation engine under Mono that runs flawlessly on my Mac and Windows. This includes a user interface that is not Windows.Forms.

I think this new release was put together my monkeys

It was.

How Interesting, you give no other reason why it is "the was the biggest steaming pile of an almost useless evironment", and instead of finding out how to change nautilus to suit you, you switch to a completely different environment.

Your opinions will mean more if they are less dramatic and provide more information.

To paraphrase you: I liked gnome's last release but this one sucks because the file selector doesn't work the way I want it to. Rather than change how it works to suit me better, I moved to another desktop. This problem was obviously not well thought out and was just an attempt to say fuck you to the rest of the world and me.

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complainin

Miguel has tried it albeit on GNU/Linux.

This was already mentioned before: the source is available

google my friend- "Can I install Connector without using Red Carpet? Question If I do not use Red Carpet to download Connector for Microsoft Exchange, how else can I get it? Answer It is STRONGLY recommended that you use Red Carpet to get Connector. Red Carpet provides features that make it easier to manage you the packages on your systems and resolves version and dependency conflicts automatically. This insures that you have all the software you need and the latest version of that software. If you are unable to use Red Carpet or choose not to use it, you can get the Connector rpm from http://ftp.ximian.com/pub/ximian-connector/ and install the package manually with you package management software. " link

How about one of the major features of Outlook that has been missing for three and a half years now? The notes/memos feature? I, and many other use it extensively, but no matter how many times it has been requested (or who requests it; check the submitter on the listed bug), it has never made it into Evolution.

You could use evolution in fink. It's only in CVS at the moment, but I'm sure that evolution 2 will be supported officially in fink eventually. Alternatively, it looks like you could compile it yourself, when it's released: unofficial ximian guide to evolution on osx

Perhaps when they purchased Ximian?

Looks like Novell renamed Evolution to Novell Evolution.

Download the source now!

If you mean just the original installation, download the ISOs (this one's Red Hat Fedora, but you can Google for another) using bittorrent (I use Azureus). I believe that the Knoppix Live CD distro has its own installer.

If you mean just the original installation, download the ISOs (this one's Red Hat Fedora, but you can Google for another) using bittorrent (I use Azureus). I believe that the Knoppix Live CD distro has its own installer.

Ximian has an Exchange add-in here.

So if we're all here high and mighty that Linux Will Solve World Hunger because of this, why aren't we doing everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) we can to solve this? It is certainly true that almost everything has been ported to Linux, but many applications have yet to appear on places like Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Sure, yeah, I've started Yenta on sourceforge as a replacement for Act! or Goldmine, but it was only recently started - with little useable code to speak of.

(Yes, I need help with that project.)

Point to this rant is that we still have a way to go before it becomes acceptable to just drop Windows in favor of Linux, but it is also up to us to make sure that if, God forbid, a worm or series of them comes out, we can patch in a hurry.

Evolution would be perfect for me too, except that they completely blew off the memos/notes portion of the application. Does it really take 4 years to add simple text containers?

Novell, you had a good run. We shall miss you.

Novell's behind Suse, Ximian, and Mono.

I don't think they'll be going away just yet...

If Microsoft changed the MSIL format, it would wreak havoc on all .NET applications, not just ones that Mono built. So if they did, they would have backward compatibility or face a bunch of angry developers. No sane company would do that, especially Microsoft (who loves backward compatiblity, to the point that they leave it in even if it risks making things unstable). Mono would just compile to the older MSIL.

Miguel has spoken on the legal issues of Mono before- this being the first page that comes to mind. I'm sure Google has a lot more.

Good choices are available.

Evolution

Kontact

Kontact Features

You're right - that would be a good idea.

Miguel also makes some very interesting points about how Windows has managed code reusability to a point that allows it to offer a more integrated desktop than Linux. Check out his text.

That's the one thing about Linux I have to say I find a bit disconcerting: the lack of uniformity among applications (and no, I'm not trying to start trolling about that.) Just read Miguel's text if you're interested.

Developers : Miguel de Icaza on Mono, Ximian/Novell, XAML
Posted by simoniker in The Mysterious Future!
from the life-in dept.
moquist writes "Netcraft has an interview with Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome and Ximian fame. Icaza expounds his thoughts on Mono (the .Net framework for open source), the current direction of Microsoft's .Net, Novell's acquisition of Ximian, Novell's Linux desktop environment, Linux for grandmas and kids, and "the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source" (Hint: it's pronounced "XAML".)."
This was automatically brought to you by Subscriber Ruiner 1.0

Good point.
PHP/MySQL will be considered secure once XAML and Avalon are released to the world. That will be the new "insecure platform" on slashdot. Not be cause PHP is inherently insecure now and XAML and Avalon will be more insecure, but rather because PHP is the easiest entry into programming and XAML will lower the bar.
-Jackson

Very true.

To quote Miguel de Icaza from today's story, "Everyone is arguing about tiny bits of the equation. [...] They are all fine points of view, but what makes Longhorn dangerous for the viability of Linux on the desktop is that the combination of Microsoft deployment power, XAML, Avalon and .NET is killer."

Admittedly OpenOffice is pretty good if you're migrating from Office 95/97 (more 97 than 95). But start anywhere at Office 2000 level, and there are some things that are copied into OpenOffice on an acceptable level, but for even the slightest deviation off the regular path for creating and saving a document you're penalized by not having a certain small feature, that exists in MS Office, but was not important enough to include in OO.

Last time I checked, APIs in the sense that guy was talking about have NOTHING to do with the processor architecture. He's talking about someone writing their own libraries that can be linked with programs written for OS X under Linux on ANY platform.

You are correct that it is unlikely someone will write such a thing; however, your contempt for the VERY NOTION of it is pretty god damn funny considering The Mono Project

and the gnomes have theirs too!

The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.

People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.

Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.

Stephen

The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.

People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.

Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.

Stephen

I'm afraid microsoft can threaten mono development using software patents just like they do with samba. We all know that the USTPO is more or less like a patent vending machine, just pay and get your patent granted. But, like Nat said, if we should worry about patents, we won't write any code.

from article:
"Organizing messages from your inbox is also different with Gmail. Gmail's approach is to use labels, instead of folders, which allows messages to have overlapping types."

This sounds very similar to the VFolder feature present in Evolution.

WIthout java, Linux is doomed soon too. After all everyone and their brother will use .NET. How can you write apps to run on both platforms?

You are overlooking something, mono. For the longest time, I saw it as another pathetic attempt to follow Windows, which I still maintain is not the way to win the desktop war. However, hearing Miguel De Icaza speak at a recent Novell event, my view has changed. It's quite a mature platform with value in it's own right. It's a great way for Windows developers to migrate to Linux seamlessly. More so even than Java. As much as it may disgust certain Linux zealots to develop on a Microsoft-tainted platform, it's a viable option. And really, why is it any worse than the start button? That's hardly a Linux innovation.
Alternatives exist. I'd be sorry to see Java disappear into obscurity, but don't think it would slow the Linux community down at all, we are far to resourceful and flexible.

anonymous just cuz I already moderated this topic

Most people don't want to learn a new packaging system.
With APT, they don't have to. They just have to be able to double-click on the program they want. I've seen lots of Windows users who love the concept and wish Windows had it.

The problem with Apt is it relies on someone else saying 'oh, that's great, I'll make some debs.'
Isn't that true for installers as well? Somebody has to make those too.

And it only works for someone with Debian or a Debian-compatable system like Lindows, Xandros, Knoppix, et al.
Ximian has a nifty tool called Build Buddy that automates the process of generating packages compatible with not just RPM and DEB systems, but Solaris and HP-UX package managers too.

Additionally, to install a deb you need to be root.
This needs improvement, yes.

Please specify a single popular commercial app that uses GTK...

Evolution.

Not only does OpenOffice have a dedicated development and support team (the StarDivision guys), it's actually notably difficult for outside contributors to get patches in at all. (Even Ximian has problems getting patches in.) Like Mozilla was under Netscape, they went open source to get the advantages of the bazaar ... then run it like a cathedral.

Ximian Evolution (Features)
Ximian Connector

Ximian Evolution (Features)
Ximian Connector

Ximian Evolution (Features)
Ximian Connector

MSFT claims that an additional cost of using OO is that it doesn't come with an email client, unlike Office (Outlook), so 'customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an email application'. I think it is noteworthy to point out that there are many free email clients, notably Evolution and KMail on Linux, and Mozilla Mail, Scribe, Mahogany, and YAMM for Windows/cross platform.

The Future of OSS Desktop Development, Part II is a current discussion of the blog debate between Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza regarding Havoc's initial essay on Mono, Java, and the Linux desktop.

also worth a read is Rasterman's (lead developer of the Enlightenment project) comment.

educate yourself.

peace

Ximian Connector comes to mind. As was already stated, Outlook Web is another (free) option, which is what I use when I'm forced to use Outlook for meetings (which I admit isn't often).

Also, in response to some of the other replies, a couple points. First, I know that it's the obvious answer to use Mozilla. Do you really think someone wasn't going to say it though? Second, like the parent, people complain "I need Outlook for work!" which is totally valid. However, in a corporate setting where you are required to use Outlook, I'd honestly hope your IT departmant as a server-side virus scanner running so these viruses and worms never even make it into your inbox. I'm talking about home users, who may not have decent antivirus software installed, etc. (which was why I said OE specifically).

For Exchange 2000/2003 users Ximian
Connector for Microsoft Exchange is a good solution for using Evolution on Linux/Solaris with the corporate server.

Robert Love frequently blogs about his progress on Project Utopia - which aims to bring all these udev, HAL, dbus and gnome-volume-manager components together in one integrated, device-plugin-happy whole.

See his various weblog entries on Project Utopia from januari for a sneak preview.

Robert Love frequently blogs about his progress on Project Utopia - which aims to bring all these udev, HAL, dbus and gnome-volume-manager components together in one integrated, device-plugin-happy whole.

See his various weblog entries on Project Utopia from januari for a sneak preview.

Robert Love frequently blogs about his progress on Project Utopia - which aims to bring all these udev, HAL, dbus and gnome-volume-manager components together in one integrated, device-plugin-happy whole.

See his various weblog entries on Project Utopia from januari for a sneak preview.