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DotGNU Ported to PocketPC
t3rmin4t0r writes "The Pocket PC# group has ported DotGNU Portable.net to PocketPC. This is a significant step because the .NET Compact Framework SDK is heavily licensed, unlike the .NET SDK available for free from MSDN. Thanks to PocketPC#, now you can build Window.Forms C# applications for PocketPC without submitting to Microsoft's exhorbitant SDK licensing fees. Portability to embedded/low-end hardware is one of Portable.net's stated goals.
DotGNU Portable.net also works on 9 major CPU architectures according to gentoo's portage. The Darwin-ports features a cool package with Windows.Forms for Mac OS X. Handhelds like iPAQ or Zaurus have also ports (the iPAQ one features Windows.Forms). Esoteric hardware like
the Sony Playstation 2 or the Microsoft XBox can also run Portable.net."
This is great for people looking to develop on handhelds and smartphones such as myself. Programming for these devices really brings me back to the good old days in the 80s where one person could create a killer app or game!
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These two companies have been beaten by Microsoft playing the game better then them.
So what are they doing 15 years later? Playing back with Linux.
Open Source is not about free for these guys, it is increasing becoming a corporate game (Novell and IBM) with big profits.
Mono / dotGNU is about trying to treat the application developers equal. This is a chance to start over with Java-like technology.
Like it or not, don't ignore C# / dotNet. It likely has more users than Sun got in 10 years, anyone have numbers to share on that?
It's slashdot. Anything which may be considered a controversial opinion (i.e. one which doesn't bow down to open source) is immediately modded as flamebait as no one will actually defend open source with arguments.
Even if a valid question is raised the gpl fanboys try and hide it. Which is a pain for people like me who use proproatary and open source software all day. I like open source but for some things I need my proprietary apps, I'm a pragmatist more interested in creating products than living to some moral standard.
-- Be careful what you say. Someone might remind you about it another day.
And Lisp is superior to either of them. The world is not Democrat vs. Republican, Christian vs. Muslim, C# vs. Java.
BOTH C# and Java are mediocre 21st-century-COBOL languages. Open Source people would do far better writing in less pedestrian languages.
No. Copying is fine. But when MS or IBM copies, they subsequently claim to "own" the "innovation" and prevent other people copying further like the hypocritical antiscientific moneygrabbing assholes they are.
It's such tyrannical restriction of the spread of information that is evil. Intellectual "property" laws are the crime, not copying.
This is using open source to provide free marketing for Microsoft. First, take a microsoft technology (.Net), then spend a lot of time and effort duplicating a subset of .Net, which will never be a complete implementation as Microsoft haven't given out all the libraries. Microsoft then have cut-down versions of '.Net' distributed on a range of systems, with no effort required from them, and they can say 'for the real, full, professional .Net experience come to Windows'. I view the .Net clones as persisting the (wrong) impression that open source software is an amateurish attempt to copy professional software.
There are better ways. Why not use Java? Its free, and there are many Java clones that are full-featured and run on Pocket-PC and PalmOS.
If you don't like Java.. why not actually be innovative and develop a new portable bytecode and languages to run on it? If not a new bytecode, why not help the work on parrot? Why not show that in VM technology open source coders can do more than simply play catch-up with Microsoft?
C is an ANSI standard language and has been implemented by hundreds of groups and companies, including all the major OS vendors.
.NET and this implementation are attempts to define, control, and open (or close) these basic layers. So if you take .NET seriously (which I do not, but that's a personal opinion), an open source equivalent is obvious and necesssary. Proprietary platforms extract a huge tax on their developers and customers: the lesson of Bell Labs' inventions and how they ended-up changing the world shows that gcc, Linux, and the thousands of other "clones" represent heroic and vital investments in reducing the cost of IT so that its benefits can reach beyond the elite.
Unix was largely standardised as POSIX long before Linux existed.
Both these (and many other technologies, such as parser generators, editors, networking) form basic layers of what has become a huge and sophisticated pyramid of applications.
Layers like
If you are still using the same applications as in 1983, then you have some catching up to do. In 1983 I was using vi and assembler and some C, and seriously, things have changed a little bit since then...
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J2ME has a childish UI library that assumes 1D screen with no layout.
Nonsense. FIrstly, screens are 2D! Secondly, there are loads of GUI toolkits for J2ME, some open source. The latest J2ME version includes a 3d-game api.
And lack of native code/regular filesystem access? Argh!
Why would you want native code access on a secure VM designed to run portable binaries?
That will (thankfully) never be the case, since C#/.NET isn't trying to be like Java. Unlike Java, C# developers are not yoked to a cross-platform philosophy.
So cross-platform is some kind of disadvantage? Perhaps you had better explain that to Perl, C++ and Python developers.
Just like C++, C# is used with different kinds of frameworks and libraries, many of them platform specific. And, hard as that may be for you to comprehend, many people want that.
Yes, that is why Java is so successful, as thousands of Java apps can and do use platform specific code: Eclipse is one example. There is nothing to stop you writing or using platform specific and native code libraries.
since all implementations of the Java platform rely on code licensed from Sun,
The HP VM is clean room, and uses no Sun code, as is Kaffe, and Taurus, and Japhar, and GCC.
Basically, the notion that the JCP is an open or independent process is laughable.
As if companies such as Oracle, IBM and HP, who are major competitors of Sun would join a process which was not independent and open.
But I guess you know better than them.