Running .NET on FreeBSD?

Dan writes "Interesting read on running .NET on FreeBSD. Chip Morton thinks this could be very beneficial to FreeBSD or any OS to have a fully functional .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) environment. With over 9,000 files, and including some 1300 public classes to pore through, the Shared Source CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) can teach you quite a bit about the internal workings of the CLR. This relevant MSDN article discusses some of the things you can learn from the source code facsimile of the CLR, like how JIT compilation works. One thing that the CLI specification does not mandate is that managed code has to run on Windows. To prove this point, Microsoft built the Shared Source CLI to compile and run on FreeBSD Unix as well as Windows XP."

Comments

There has got to be a catch..

[override11]

You can only run .net on BSD if you are emulating it under a licensed Windows .Net Server

Anyone else this there is going to be some kind of gotcha??

Re:There has got to be a catch..

[REBloomfield]

no catch! this is actually the point of the .NET framework, right once, run anywhere, what Java tried, and never quite achieved :(

The only 'catch' is that there needs to be a native virtual machine, which most platforms (apart from MS) don't have yet, but check out the Mono project for a Linux implementation.

get yer hands out of my server closet

[ubiquitin]

Call me skeptical, but did occur to anyone else that Microsoft picked FreeBSD because
1) they despise the GPL for what it represents and
2) Mono is being developed on Linux?

Don't get me wrong, I run several FreeBSD servers and prefer the ports system over RPM. It just unnerves me when the Microsoft marketing machine starts mucking around on my chosen platform.

As a postscript, you all should be aware that PHP may well become the best platform for deploying .NET. Here's why and here's why this is irrelevant.