Novell Presents Mono Roadmap

H0ek writes "Seems Mono is still moving along in spite of the Novell purchase. They present a nicely comprehensive roadmap. You can read the official Novell press release if you're into that kind of nonsense. All I can say is, go Miguel! Don't let the Man get you down!"

Comments

Is Mono a death threat to Microsoft?

[Captain Kirk]

If I understand this Cringely article correctly, .Net will make Microsoft hardware independent - I, Cringely

All of the MS products are being rewritten to be based on .Net. ISVs are being pushed towards .Net. In the case of VB developers, they simply don;t have a choice. For C++ developers, MS is constantly selling us the manageed C++ mantra. Even game developers are getting the .NEt pitch.

If Mono works, then Microsofts own products, those of independent system developers and popular games will all be just as good on Linux, OSX, etc. as they will be on Windows. That should make MS very nervous. Go Miguel!

Re:Is Mono a death threat to Microsoft?

[4of12]

If Mono works, then Microsofts own products, those of independent system developers and popular games will all be just as good on Linux, OSX, etc. as they will be on Windows. That should make MS very nervous.

As nice as the potential technology is behind .NET and Mono might be, I tend to be more worried that the interfaces to heavily-used class libraries and components will not be sufficiently specified. That is, not all of the behavior will be replicated if you simply drag `n drop your Visual developed application from the latest Longhorn server over to a cheap Linux box. Does that even happen in the Java world, where cross-platform portability is constantly trumpeted?

Differentiating themselves from commodity Linux platforms and leveraging their strength in Windows seems to be more consistent with Microsoft's business objectives.

Re:Hate to beat a dead horse, but....

[DukeyToo]

.NET is very Windows-UNspecific, not at all what you would expect from MS. It has some Microsoft specific stuff, (eg. accessing windows registry) but that is generally relegated to a separate "Microsoft" namespace.

In addition, you seem to think that .NET is all about Windows Forms. It is not. For me, that is the least interesting aspect. You can write console applications, or server deamons, or web services, or DLLs for re-use by multiple UIs.

Like Java, C# is here NOW, and C# developers are here now. As are VB.NET developers, as fast as they can convince their management to change. As a platform, .NET has a large amount of support, from the people who write software for Microsoft platforms. I assure you, there are very many.

For myself, I develop specifically for Windows, and .NET has to be very important to my career. And Mono is too, because it opens up a whole new market for my MS-centric skills - suddenly, I have a chance of telling management that they are no longer tied to MS because their business relies on my Windows program. And that is very exciting.

If you are a Java specialist, there is really no need to stray, for now. However, Microsoft will do everything it can to make it easier and easier for you to migrate your skills to .NET, and at some point in the future it may become worth your while.

Re:So... what's the deal?

[DukeyToo]

ASP.NET is definitely ahead of vanilla ASP. It has separated code from display, which is good. It has also added web controls, which are very very powerful. It is also (mostly) compiled, which adds speed.

However, it is still lacking in several areas:
* lack of built-in page templating mechanism
* datagrids are latebound (and possibly interpreted)
* CSS support in Visual Studio is abysmal
* the style of ASP.NET is "lots of custom pages" - it does not encourage large maintainable web sites.

All in all, it is very "VB" - nice and easy to create something simple, but it takes some ingenuity to create a larger, maintainable product.