Mono's Cocoa# Underway, GTK# Takes on Windows.Forms

Gentu writes "OSNews posted some exclusive screenshots of a new project in the Mono community: Cocoa#. Apparently there are a couple of Apple engineers helping out the project that allows developers to create graphical Cocoa applications under Mac OS X using the C#, Python or Basic language. Mono seems to be doing well in the Windows land too, allowing developers to use GTK# instead of Windows.Forms to create multi-platform apps."

Comments

Yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a headache just reading the headline. Give us old fogies a break, we're used to seeing the hash mark at the beginning of the line...

Re:Yikes!

[NanoGator]

"I got a headache just reading the headline. Give us old fogies a break, we're used to seeing the hash mark at the beginning of the line..."

Confused me too!

"Cocoa# No such channel"

Re:Yikes!

[meringuoid]

Personally, I just thought:

Avert your eyes, children! He may take on other.Forms!

Re:Yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

mmm... hashish.. mixes with cocoa:)

Re:Yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

it does?

details please!

Re:Yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Melt some butter into it. Wait. Pick the fat, throw away the shit. Mix with chocolate powder. Add milk. Duh?

Re:Yikes!

[kevin_conaway]

GOAL. Well played, best Simpsons reference ive seen in a while.

Windows.Forms in Mono

[miguel]

I wanted to mention that our path to indepedence
clearly goes through Gtk#, but we realize the
importance of giving users binary compatibility
so we are actively developing Windows.Forms and
Visual Basic.NET (gasp) for Mono.

A new from scratch implementation has started with
four of the top Mono developers that are now
locked up in Provo Utah working around the clock
to delivery the new implementation of Windows.Forms
(our previous Wine-based approach having too many
Mono/Wine problems to solve).

Miguel.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

Provo, Utah? Wow - that's just cruel.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

while you are at it, feel free to improve Windows.Forms. Microsoft's version of it has some odd limitations, and considering they are planning to replace Windows.Forms with a complete re-write, they are not spending any time fixing these things.

For example, it is supposedly impossible to have a context menu on a treeview that responds properly to both the mouse right-click and the context menu keyboard key (without resorting to Win32). If anyone has got this to work, please tell how..

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

As in replace W.F with XAML or do you mean something else? More details please.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[prockcore]

A new from scratch implementation has started with four of the top Mono developers that are now
locked up in Provo Utah working around the clock
to delivery the new implementation of Windows.Forms

What are they doing then? I thought using wine was going to solve the p/invoke issue. Are you just going to ignore the p/invoke and just implement the exposed API?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[killjoe]

Great. Should be done by the time MS moves to avalon.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[mhesseltine]

A new from scratch implementation has started with four of the top Mono developers that are now locked up in Provo Utah working around the clock to delivery the new implementation of Windows.Forms (our previous Wine-based approach having too many Mono/Wine problems to solve).

So, you're re-writing from scratch, trying to play catch-up to Microsoft? Why is this a good use of programmer time again? What real purpose does the Mono project serve?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[mr. marbles]

Great. Should be done by the time MS moves to avalon.

Umm... You go Girl! Way to hit the hard working hackers giving away their work... where it hurts.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[killjoe]

I call it as I see it. This is a collasal waste of time. Those hackers should be working on cloning avalon not windows.forms.

I am especially appalled by the idea that they are going to throw away all that they have written already and starting from scratch.

It's their time, it's their money, they have a right to do anything they want but that does not mean I have to agree.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[shird]

wtf? where is the windows.forms implementation under Linux? They are writing it from scratch because the previous version was using Wine and didnt work properly, so now they are doing it 'natively'.

Microsoft hasnt written a windows.forms implementation under Linux - they are not playing 'catch up', they are implementing something that doesnt yet exist.

The mono project allows programs written in .net to run under Linux, simple as that. It means eg. when Microsoft releases Office.NET, it can be run under Linux (depending on how pure the .net is). Good enough reason for mono?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Jugalator]

It's not like Longhorn will drop support for Windows.Forms, and I think the only thing they might miss is some GUI widgets and some special functionality new to Longhorn. I think most people can make that tradeoff for platform independency for now. If they want to make platform depended stuff using the very latest Longhorn stuff, go for Microsoft .NET.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Cocteaustin]

I love that you have a team of developers locked up in Provo! It's so sad yet hillarious. Godspeed!

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[dedazo]

Where is your open source project. Let's see it.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Matt - Duke '05]

Perhaps actually trying to accomplish what you claim is impossible might help you out a bit. This took me about 30 seconds to do:

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace TreeTest {
public class TreeTest : Form {
[STAThread]
public static int Main(string[] args) {
Application.Run(new TreeTest());
return 0;
}

public TreeTest() {
tree = new Tree();
tree.Dock = DockStyle.Fill;
Controls.Add(tree);
Text = "TreeTest";
}

private Tree tree;
}

public class Tree : TreeView {
public Tree() {
menuItem = new MenuItem("Menu Item");
contextMenu = new ContextMenu();
contextMenu.MenuItems.Add(menuItem);
}

protected override void OnKeyDown(KeyEventArgs e) {
base.OnKeyDown(e);

if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Apps) {
ShowMenu(new Point(0, 0));
}
}

protected override void OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e) {
base.OnMouseUp(e);

if (e.Button != MouseButtons.Right) {
return;
}

ShowMenu(new Point(e.X, e.Y));
}

protected void ShowMenu(Point pos) {
contextMenu.Show(this, pos);
}

protected ContextMenu contextMenu;
protected MenuItem menuItem;
}
}

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[The Grassy Knoll]

I love reading Miguel's replies. They're like poetry ;-)

.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[ambrosine10]

Those people criticizing Miguel really need to shut up. Here is a man who has contributed much code to open-source projects, is a great leader in the movement, and works for what he believes in. Yet these zealots are constantly yelling at him just because he happens to see MS technology in an impartial light. Just because it's by MS doesn't automatically make it bad. In fact if it wasn't for people like Miguel who try to merge practicality with idealism, the open-source movement would be as irrevelant as ever.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[The Grassy Knoll]

Well I hardly think there's any reason for that kind of language.

I was merely commenting on the formatting of his posts.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, I realize, but I really wonder how you got that code to format reasonably on slashcode.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[KAMiKAZOW]

our path to indepedence clearly goes through Gtk#

Why GTK#? Honestly, GTK is probably one of the worst toolkit for real cross platform development.
The Windows port of GTK sucks. This WiMP thing (Or whatever it's called - it makes GTK app to some degree look like native Windows apps) is not that great. The performance of the GTK(WIMP) apps' GUI is noticeable lower than a native GUI.

Under Mac OS X it's even worse. GTK only works under X11. This means no Aqua look & feel. No copy and paste or drag'n'drop between native OSX apps and GTK apps. Even keyboard shortcuts are different.

Why didn't you chose something like wxWidgets? At least wxWidgets offers native GUIs under any platforms it runs. wxWidgets or any other toolkit that offers real platform independence.
Or: With all these XML GUIs under .NET (like XAML) Ximian could've used Mozilla's XUL toolkit and have better multi platform integration than GTK.

Also - from what I've read on the mailing list archives - Mono only works sometimes on BSD systems.

What kind of independence is this? You are only focused on x86-Linux running GNOME.

Ximian does not seem really interested in real platform CocoaSharp. Stuff like Qt# (for KDE users), CocoaSharp, and other cross platform develpment is not done by any Ximian guy, but from contributors.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

This took me about 30 seconds to do:

Yeah right. Like you could even type it that fast, let alone write it.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is your open source project. Let's see it.

Well, I try to keep the two things independent of each other, but if you insist, here it is. A small project, but perhaps you've heard of it.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

mwahaha. Loser.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[IamTheRealMike]

It was, but there were communications issues. So now they're going to not only try to implement the entirely of S.W.F in C# (that's an entire widget toolkit!) but also a fake WndProc/Handle property for apps that rely on the underlying Win32ness of it.

For *really* hard core apps (read: most .NET apps) that actually mix native and .NET code, they were talking about having a special "winelib" mode where it's somehow used, but I've not seen any credible technical details on this.

Basically it looks like in order to run .NET code that is mixed with native Win32 code the Wine team will have to do their own S.W.F implementation one day. Currently there are no killer .NET apps that I know of (by killer I mean public/retail software sufficiently unique that it's a "blocks my migration to Linux" app, rather than custom corp apps) so it's not a big deal. But I expect they'll come eventually.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[rhysweatherley]

wtf? where is the windows.forms implementation under Linux? They are writing it from scratch because the previous version was using Wine and didnt work properly, so now they are doing it 'natively'.

Microsoft hasnt written a windows.forms implementation under Linux - they are not playing 'catch up', they are implementing something that doesnt yet exist.

Actually, it does. DotGNU Portable.NET has had a native implementation of SWF for over a year now. We discarded Wine as a viable option from day one.

DotGNU Web Site.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

Use tags.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[IamTheRealMike]

First of all, there is no magic bullet to write quality desktop software and have it run anywhere. These days, if you want to write a program once and have it feel native on each platform, you need to be either using native widgets on each platform, or to have a big investment in custom code and tweaks in your toolkit for each platform.

GTK# runs on multiple platforms. Unsurprisingly it works best on the platform most people use it on. It does not run well on Windows or MacOS X, but that's simply because few people have worked on it/been interested in it. That can be fixed, with time.

When Miguel said "GTK# is the path to independence" he was talking about API independence not platform independence. They are different.

wxWidgets does not give platform independence. Sorry, but it just doesn't cut it for quality software. Abstractions work best when the things they abstract are semantically very similar (or identical) - widget toolkits are not similar, they often work in very different ways and have radically different capabilities. I've yet to run a wxWidgets app which didn't feel piss poor on every platform : much like Swing apps not feeling native everywhere, wxWidgets apps never fit in. This doesn't cut it for writing good software for the free desktop.

Or: With all these XML GUIs under .NET (like XAML) Ximian could've used Mozilla's XUL toolkit and have better multi platform integration than GTK.

GTK is a proven platform used by many, many applications. XUL is really only used by the Mozilla suite of apps: it lacks such basic things as the still theoretically xulrunner. That's why it was chosen.

Also - from what I've read on the mailing list archives - Mono only works sometimes on BSD systems. What kind of independence is this? You are only focused on x86-Linux running GNOME.

So what? Wine doesn't work on BSD systems currently either, but this is the fault of BSD not Wine (and I believe the same is true of Mono). Both Wine and Mono do very complex things with threading, address space management and low level OS calls that BSD either doesn't support or nobody with the relevant expertise has shown up to write the support. The vast majority of people use Linux, so this gets the best support. This is the open source meritocracy : write the code and the support will come, yes?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Hortensia Patel]

The dual-path approach you're taking strikes me as eminently sensible, but AFAIK Gtk does not use the native look-and-feel for a platform, so I have doubts about whether it'll ever be a compelling alternative for non-Gnome users.

Did you give any thought to layering the unencumbered-GUI path on top of a crossplatform but native-widget toolkit, like SWT? Yes, it's Java, but I believe that Eclipse/SWT has been run in .NET using the IKVM virtual machine, so it's presumably not impossible.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[marco_craveiro]

just out of curiousity, what are your main complaints about gtk2 on windows? i have used the gimp and i now use ethereal almost every day with 250 meg capture files and it never once crashed on me. the interface is not ultra-responsive but it does not lag behind much more than win2k's. and with glade's installer its now really easy to get a development environment on win32. can you elaborate on your problems with gtk on windows?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[JamesP]

THANK YOU!

You said everything I wanted to say. GTK sucks for anything other than X11...

WxWidgets runs a lot better.

I wouldn't think twice before choosing WIndows.Forms over GTK#

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[squiggleslash]

The major argument isn't against Miguel as what he's doing and the mindset commonly associated with Miguel.

What most of us want is something better than what Microsoft does, more than that, we want something exciting, radical, and different. The mindset that Miguel and others seem to share is that as long as "our" stuff is Free, it is better, and there's no point in creating a better technology, we might just as well copy Microsoft, fix a few bugs, extend here and there, and, voila, you have something better. The technology isn't better, but the implementation is, and that's enough, right?

It's more than that though, it's an unwinnable contest. As long as Microsoft's "competitors" are merely trying to catch up with Microsoft, implementing the same technologies, there's no way, in practice, those competitors can actually be better except on purely political grounds.

Now don't get me wrong, I consider myself an enthusiast of free software. But if you're going to write an operating system from the ground up, then you're wasting a lot of opportunities by relentlessly copying someone else, especially copying the technologies - from the user interfaces to the APIs - of a company whose reputation in the industry is of being first, not best. It's a waste of talent.

The issue becomes worse when you consider that these competitors are trying to build Microsoft's environment upon an operating system that has a fundementally different philosophy at its heart, meaning any competitor designed this way is going to be fundamentally flawed. Linux, arguably, should be abandoned in favour of ReactOS if this development path continues.

A substantial section of the free software and open source communities lacks the talent and imagination to build something new, and unfortunately that section is leading development at the moment. Miguel is merely the figurehead for that movement. I don't blame people for feeling that way, I know a lot of people would like a Free clone of Microsoft's operating systems and environments, I just feel that this is a bandwagon the GNU/Linux distributions are unwise in hopping on to and pouring so much development time into.

The question really is do you want a Free Windows, or do you want a choice of platforms? Right now, GNU/Linux is Window's most powerful competitor, yet all the excitement, the innovation, the "We want to create something better" attitude, is coming from elsewhere.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

What most of us want is something better than what Microsoft does, more than that, we want something exciting, radical, and different

The thing is, the Unix world had many many years to develop something better than Microsoft. What you got was Motif, a gazillion emacs modules, key-command window managers, and various scripting components.

The fact is that "people like Miguel" (which include the KDE group, also relentless Microsoft copycats) have done more for the desktop in the last 4 years than the rest of the Unix community did in the previous 15. When the history books are written, Miguel's "Unix Sucks" paper will be seen as a major landmark.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[squiggleslash]

The thing is, the Unix world had many many years to develop something better than Microsoft. What you got was Motif, a gazillion emacs modules, key-command window managers, and various scripting components.

And you got OpenStep, NEWS, and other environments that were technically excellent. Until the mid-nineties though, most of the development was closed. And, unfortunately, pretty much the moment the F/OSS communities started up, it was clear they wanted to clone Windows. I recall the first version of RedHat I installed was set up with FVWM95 as the default WM.

The Unix world has had its good GUIs, I even linked to a pioneer in the field, it's the F/OSS communities that have insisted on ignoring work relevent to Unix and instead tried to graft on to an OS fundamentally unlike Windows an environment that was as Windows-like as possible.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

The mindset that Miguel and others seem to share is that as long as "our" stuff is Free, it is better, and there's no point in creating a better technology, we might just as well copy Microsoft, fix a few bugs, extend here and there, and, voila, you have something better. The technology isn't better, but the implementation is, and that's enough, right?

This is the same method that Microsoft uses most of the time to get ahead, embrace and extend, and they're at the top of the heap when it comes to the desktop market, so they must be doing something right. It's about time that Microsoft's own techniques are used against them. Maybe this will make them actually waste resources keeping up their .NET implementations.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[KAMiKAZOW]

I found the GUIs of GAIM and GIMP really sluggish.
When I moved a window, it was completly white. The buttons etc rebuild on screen only after I stopped moving the window. Context menus behaved strange and so on.

I was on an old Duron PC. Maybe with today's >3GHz CPUs it's not noticeable anymore, but I found it disturbing.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[KAMiKAZOW]

wxWidgets apps never fit in

Sometimes a few graphics used don't fit. Eg VLC on Windows uses gnomish graphics by default, but the app uses Windows native buttons, scrollbars etc.
The situation with Audacity is simmilar.

Of course, an wxWidgets app does not look native on every OS (--> used icons). But "by default" wx apps are closer to native than GTK apps.

I don't say that wx is the solution to all problems. It was just an example by me. Maybe there are other toolkits that support native widgets.

this is the fault of BSD

It's the fault of BSD that Ximian does not support BSD? I've read more than once that DotGNU Portable.NET is more portable than Mono. Most has to do how the developers write their software. Just because Linux is their main target, they don't have to use every Linux exclusive feature. Sometimes you can also achieve the same with more portable code.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Abcd1234]

So how do you deal with the p/invoke issue? Or did you just ignore it?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

SWT ?

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Skibbering]

117 in 30 seconds.. that's a pretty impressive 234 words per minute*. Duuude, is your keyboard smokin'??

(* with a conservative estimate of 0 minutes, 0 seconds devoted to analysis, design, building and testing! ;)

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps actually trying to accomplish what you claim is impossible might help you out a bit. This took me about 30 seconds to do:

Looking at your example, I'm not sure it covers what I am talking about. My problem is that I need a context menu based on what specific item in the treeview I right click on or if using the keyboard key, which item is selected (highlighted). The context menu is generated specifically based on which item you click on or have selected. The problem was that you could only either use the coordinates from the mouse to match up with an item, or you could use the selected item, but not both.. There may have been a problem with getting the context menu to line up with the selected item, too.

I even found an example where someone wrote quite a bit of Win32 code to make up for this, and they claimed it was impossible without Win32. I have done my research. I'll take another stab at it when I get a chance, but your 30 second example doesn't really prove that it can be done.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Archibald Buttle]

Now this raises an interesting question.

Why do we have both Mono and DotGNU implementations of Windows.Forms?

Why dedicate four senior Mono developers to solving something that the GNU project has already tackled? Won't the DotGNU version work with Mono? If that's the case why not just take the DotGNU version as a starting point and work from there?

Or is this some kind of licensing issue? It would not surprise me if the DotGNU implementation was lumbered with a full GPL, rather than an LGPL, thus making it unusable for anything appart from "free" software.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Bluesman]

Here's the question that needs to be asked over and over:

"Better" in terms of what?

Most people's idea of "better" means that they'll be able to use a computer more effectively. Whether that's writing programs quickly, or that will run without hassle on a majority of currently installed desktop platforms, or just sending a message across the country.

To everyone but CS geeks, a computer is a tool to get things done. Whether the tool is the absolute best it can be is irrelevant, as long as it does the job people want it to do. If Mono allows people to get what they want to do done more efficiently, they're going to use it, and that's a good thing.

Miguel understands this, I think.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[jcupitt65]

You are describing the behaviour of gtk1.2 on windows. The current gtk2.4 is very different. Have you tried gimp2?

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Prior Restraint]

This took me about 30 seconds to do:

Man, I wish I could type that fast!

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Naikrovek]

30 seconds. you type FAST, man.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[-=Zak=-]

I've been writing a GTK# app on Windows off and on over the last couple of weeks. I have it looking pretty much like a native Windows application, but I agree - the GUI performance on Windows just stinks. I use GAIM on Windows every day and it has the same problem. I assume it's GTK+ that needs some tweaking...

But it won't stop me from using GTK#. Someday when the GTK performance gets better, my app will benefit too.

-Zak

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[KAMiKAZOW]

I don't know which versions of GTK2 I tried, but I had these experiences with v2.
A few weeks ago I switched to Mac. Now I can't test any GTK version for Windows.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

The folks at SharpDevelop tried to port SWT from Java to C# so SharpDevelop could run on Mono too; however, it failed miserably.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

Because DotGNU only works with X11 and the Mono implementation is supposed to also run natively on Win32 and Mac. (And in the future there is supposed to be a driver that allows to use Wine and solve the P/Invoke requirements)

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[True Grit]

It would not surprise me if the DotGNU implementation was lumbered with a full GPL

No, PNet is LGPL, like glibc.

Mono started out using Wine to support W.F, while .GNU wrote portable emulatation for it (allegedly pretty good too), so they never tried to work together on this. After the arguments between them, I don't know if they'll ever work together on anything now.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Archibald Buttle]

Thanks for the reassurance about the licensing of DotGNU.

And thanks to for pointing me towards that argument thread between the Mono and DotGNU folks. Miguel seems to have a talent for winding people up the wrong way and Rhys seems to have an exceptionally thin skin. That is just my observation - I don't mean to offend either party by saying this.

It seems to me that both need to work on their people skills, and learn the meaning of the word "compromise". Unfortunately from my observations "compromise" is a word missing from the vocabulary of many free software people - RMS and ESR possibly being the two best examples of this phenomena.

It's a great shame that Mono and DotGNU won't be working together. A very useful philosophy to have when conducting software development is to not re-invent the wheel. By refusing to make slight compromises in their positions these guys seem intent to do exactly that and waste a load of effort. It's sad, and we all suffer from it.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[True Grit]

It's a great shame that Mono and DotGNU won't be working together.

You're right, it is a shame. What really annoys me about that "argument" is that I never did get a good understanding of the technical differences between them from reading it, and why they can't cooperate on some of the common infrastructure. It seemed to veer personal/political from the beginning.

Why does Mono need to reimplement Windows.Forms again for example? DotGNU has already done that, and I would think a lot of the infrastructure could be used by both groups since they are both coding in C#.

I'm a great fan of choice, its because of choice that I don't mind their being both Gnome and KDE, when it comes to desktops, as far as I'm concerned the more the better. However, these guys are not only going against the current within the FOSS community (witness the cynicism and suspicion of those against using any technology that comes from Redmond), they are also going up against Microsoft, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. MS isn't the kind of innovator that they make themselves out to be (a lot of .NET really isn't terribly innovative), but

• .NET's technology is actually pretty decent, a better Java than Java so to speak.
• .NET's potential, with MS's monopoly behind it, will *far* exceed Java, and really has the real potential of killing Java off.(*)
• If MS does things correctly (a lot depends on Longhorn), .NET will almost certainly succeed in solidifying MS's hold on the PC industry.

All of this means the FOSS community needs to provide an alternative, not necessarily a clone, not even a compatible alternative, but at least another option besides the one offered by the Devil himself.

What is frustrating to me is there is enormous potential in Mono/DotGNU to dramatically improve the FOSS community, yes, I said *FOSS*, not MS. One standardized "managed code" platform to which all/most languages could be ported to would drastically improve productivity and portability for *us*, never mind what it may or may not do for MS.

Unfortunately, Mono has chosen to follow so closely in the footsteps of the 800 pound gorilla, they risk being stepped on if that gorilla bothers to look back and see who's following him. Meanwhile, DotGNU is practically unheard of to most, because Mono gets all the press, and DotGNU, won't or can't use any part of Mono's code in order to catch up. So while our community fragments between 2 standards, MS is leaving us in the dust as it accelerates its .NET plan.

Unlike desktop environments, where personal opinions are as numerous as the stars, the Mono/DotGNU concept can only succeed when it becomes an accepted standard (on Windows MS can accomplish this easily as they control the OS), but 2 different competing standards doesn't help anyone but MS, because the FOSS community simply isn't big enough to support 2 standards in this particular category of software.

I really wish these people realized that in this case, choice is *not* a good thing, to get where they want to go, they have to join under one banner, so that the entire FOSS community can rally to it. Only when all of FOSS has come under one banner, do we have any chance of getting the attentions of those outside our community, otherwise those folk will all end up going to .NET. Is this really hard to see? Am I wrong? Why can't they see this?

(*) Yes, I know .NET isn't going after Java directly *now*, but Java fans shouldn't have any illusions as to what MS intends to do with .NET, they are just starting from the opposite end that Java started from. They're conquering the desktop first, which Java failed to do, and *then* they'll head for the servers with a vengence. When that happens, once .NET is already entrenched on the PCs, then, IMHO, its goodbye Java, Perl, Python, PHP, et. al. We, the FOSS community, will end up being the only ones still using these languages.

Signed,
Frustrated.

Re:Windows.Forms in Mono

[Anonymous Coward]

30 seconds. you type FAST, man.

Yeah, Visual Studio code completion help that!

What exactly are you looking for?

[junkymailbox]

You know there are panther and aqua themes out there that look and behave quite similarly to the mac theme. find them at Themes at freshmeat

Re:What exactly are you looking for?

[theantix]

uh, dude.

An interface is *so* much more than widgets and icons.

And I'm a Gnome zealot, for crying out loud.

dude.

Patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the mono FAQ:

Question 131: Could patents be used to completely disable Mono (either submarine patents filed now, or changes made by Microsoft specifically to create patent problems)?

... The controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets. Those are convenient for people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, but are not required for the open source Mono platform, nor integration with today's Mono's rich support of Linux.

Re:Patents?

[mritunjai]

Also remeber that... JPEG, GIF, SDRAM, etc were/are also STANDARDS... it didn't stop some companies to use submarine patents to extract royalties!

Re:Patents?

[smallguy78]

Seeing as MS see linux as a threat right now, you would've thought they would've acted by now, to shore up any patents they have. Particularly now Novell are part of the Mono scene.

Re:Patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mono's rich support of Linux."

Anybody who uses the word 'rich' in that kind of context is a corporate tool. Is MS writing their copy for them too?

Re:Patents?

[dasmegabyte]

I don't think Microsoft is too worried about the effect of Mono. If they were, they wouldn't have had their framework standardized in the first damn place, they would have kept it proprietary like MFC. I mean, think about it: thanks to Mono, they get support for their products on multiple platforms without having to do any real work or to actually SUPPORT them ("Sorry man, Word.NET may WORK on Linux, but we don't support it.", the same thing they do to you now if you use VMWare). Which means money's still coming in for apps built on .NET and the lack of a Microsoft OS is offset by the lower support cost.

In my opinion, Mono is what's going to bring Linux to the average man by bringing the essence of the new Windows (the .NET Framework) to alternative desktops. And it's going to save Microsoft from losing big-time as more companies switch to Linux. Mono could be the great computational equalizer. Iit'd be Java, but Sun shot themselves in the foot with their MS lawsuit -- shit, MS was doing the same thing IBM was doing at the moment, where's the IBM Lawsuit guys?

Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see Windows developers switching to Gtk# just coz "It works in Linux" ... They will rather go elsewhere like Wx.NET for example (it runs on native OSX) or run Winforms using Portable.net's Swing based Winforms (that sounds like a LOT of volunteer work ?). They will NOT use Gtk# or Cocoa# until they have a VS.NET designer built-in .

I have this distinct feeling that supporting Windows.Forms out of the box would have affected Miguel's stated reasons for Mono ie Gtk# and using it for Gnome apps..... That's why probably Mono didn't implement Windows.Forms for Mono 1.0 (talk about MAJOR feature missing). But this is totally off that map ?.

If Apple does run .NET finally , it'll probably be licensed off Microsoft to prevent Microsoft from screwing them later. I have a feeling Miguel and Ximian-Novell is just doing "Free" development for Apple if they release this under LGPL. I care more about running my winforms apps on Linux and BSD , not about how "cool" embedding a browser control in C# is.

Nothing to see here folks ... move on

Re:Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple does run .NET finally , it'll probably be licensed off Microsoft to prevent Microsoft from screwing them later.

Why? C# is an EMCA standard. Apple can reinvent the wheel themselves, use Mono for free, or pay Microsoft for a product which doesn't exist.

Re:Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt!

Apple will continue to not to give a shit about .Net or mono.

Apple will also continue to not give a shit about MS's Java clone.

Re:Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[cujo_1111]

C# != .NET CLR

The C# language may be a standard but the .NET runtime is a MS proprietary object.

Re:Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[Anonymous Coward]

See my response below: Windows forms eats out nanny goats. Why on earth anyone want to use it for programs (win32 or not) is beyond comprehension, unless they are forced to use an all-Microsoft environment by their pointy haired boss who eats up MS's marketing propaganda. Windows Forms is a based on a grid-layout architecture that stinks as bad as a decaying goat. The fact is: Windows forms is never the right solution to any GUI programming problem.

Re:Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that the parent was modded 'informative' is absolutely tragic.

In other news, I heard that if you use .NET the wheels of your car fall off.

*waits for inevitable modding-up*

Re:Why doesn't mono get it (winforms)??

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you explain more what a grid-layout architecture us is and why its so bad? Seriously.

Mono vs. Java (again)

[fupeg]

There are some decent arguments for using Mono over Java on Linux. Those arguments don't hold up as well on OSX, though. Java support on the Mac is in many ways superior to Java on any other platform, especially for Swing apps (the counterpart to most Cocoa# apps.) Still it could be attractice to have a framework that made it as easy as Java is for developing cross-platform (Windows/Linux/OSX) apps that would have significant performance advantages over Java on 2 out of 3 of those platforms.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Pardon me, but how much Swing development have you done on OSX? I've done plenty as OSX was to be my primary development environment, targetting windows users. After about a month of that, I now do most of my development on an XP laptop.

There are NUMEROUS outstanding issues with Apple's JVM. First off, the perfomance is significantly slower than on Windows ( this is comparing my Dual G5 w/1GB RAM to a 2.2GHz Celeron w/512M laptop ).

Secondly, the setFont() function is completely ignored for JTextArea and defaults to monospaced serif fonts and white backgrounds.

There are too many problems to list here, but honestly, Swing/Java for OSX is nowhere near the quality of the Windows or Linux implementation ( even as much as I wish it was ).

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on this. I develop Java applications including Swing applications on my Powerbook all day long. I deploy these applications on Linux and Windows as well as Mac OS X. I have never had a single problem with cross platform development.

There are tricks to learn but there are no major issues with Swing development on OS X. As with any language, knowing what you are doing helps tremendously.

And claiming that a Celeron outperforms Java on a G5 is such complete bullshit. Do you honestly expect people to believe that crap? Perhaps you should show some benchmarks because the ones I have seen show just the opposite.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[The Grassy Knoll]

>the counterpart to most Cocoa# apps

I think you meant to say "ugly sister to"

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[yuri]

Good Mac Apps are not written in Swing/SWT/GTK.

Thats why Cocoa# is so important. You can take existing .Net apps and port them to Mac.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[alext]

There are some decent arguments for using Mono over Java on Linux

If there are, I'd be interested to see them. Or, more empirically, we would expect to see some evidence of Mono take-up in the business world.

Right now, Java is everywhere in critical LoB applications and has huge support from IBM, Sun, Oracle, BEA and a cast of thousands. In terms of the investment being pumped into applications, in relative terms Mono is absolutely nowhere. And I'd be interested to see performance figures for applications using recent JVMs vs. Mono - certainly the JRockit JVM wiped the floor with Dotnet 1.1 on Wintel in my tests and I doubt if Sun or IBM's JVMs would be far behind.

Holding hands and chanting is no substitute for reality.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[BlowChunx]

...right, good mac apps are written in Cocoa!

I highly doubt that a ported .NET app is going to follow the HIG that most mac apps adhere to.

To my eye, it's just a subtle attempt to put a nail in the coffin of JAVA. Take away it's original purpose of "write once, run anywhere"...or how about Sun getting on the band wagon with "JAVA now with .NETty goodness!".

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[bay43270]

I highly doubt that a ported .NET app is going to follow the HIG that most mac apps adhere to.

I don't think you understand what cocoa# is. Its not for porting existing .net applications (although you could, if you had clean separation between the interface and logic, but it would be a lot of work). Cocoa# will allow the programmer to bind their .NET code to a cocoa nib file just as the Java cocoa bindings do. Porting a .net application to cocoa# will require a complete UI rewrite. Why wouldn't such an application follow the HIG?

Windows forms applications, of course will probably never follow the HIG.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[pyite]

Right now, Java is everywhere in critical LoB applications [...]

Yes, but do you realize how long it took to get decent acceptance? Java has been a joke for most of its existance and frankly I still consider it to be laughable. How long has it been around and how much does JVM performance still suck? Try running a complex Struts application on anything less than 512MB of RAM. I believe the introduction of Java unto the computing world to be the single worst event in language history. I'd rather Java up and disappear than Microsoft. At least some good ideas come out of Redmond.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[chochos]

I'm running Monodevelop on a powerbook and it feels faster than some Java apps... It would be nice to be able to run it without X11, though. Let's hope that the Cocoa# project allows us to do just that (though I doubt it, since Monodevelop relies on some mozilla and GTK components for the code editor and help viewers).

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimme a break. javadev at Apple is replete with bugs in MacOS X Java. Here are some that effect me personally. Lessee... Pop-up menus don't handle HTML text properly. fillCircle (!!!) is done wrong -- it draws one pixel too wide and one pixel too tall. drawRoundRect and fillRoundRect are wrong. Various font metrics are incorrect. Java3D has got all sorts of rendering errors compared to Windows. Cocoa Java (1.4.x) isn't hardware accelerated (!!!!). Apple hasn't provided any sane way to handle its single overhead menubar: if you switch windows, including standard dialog boxen to which you can't attach a menubar, the overhead menus disappear. Looks grotesquely on-Maclike, and there's no way to fix it. Menu accelerators don't work either. JScrollView's space at the bottom right doesn't jibe correctly with a window's resize box.

phew! That's just a few of 'em.

I code Java on the Mac because I love the Mac. But Apple's Java implementation is definitely in last place among the big three.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[anarkhos]

If the .NET code access files by path then you have a problem already.

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh!

Sounds like a sore bottomed, out of work VB programmer!

You do your thing!

Re:Mono vs. Java (again)

[pyite]

Sounds like a sore bottomed, out of work VB programmer!

Wow, you couldn't be any further from the truth. I make good money doing enterprise networking, with Cisco equipment, specifically. When I code, I code as a means to an end, to fix a problem. Computers are merely a tool for me. As such, I'll use whatever language I deem fit.

wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with Mono

[after]

I've been using wxWidgets for some corperate develpment and I don't think I can be more happy with it. Integrating Cocoa into Mono is nice with GTK and all (didn't read article- sorry,) but is it going to use native UI faculties that the operating system provides? wxWidgets even has .NET interpolabilito under development called wx.NET and you can use that with Mono too.

Apple could really benefit...

[callipygian-showsyst]

..from embracing (and extending!) C# and .NET. Programmers generally like C# and .NET for application development, and Objective-C has some serious flaws.

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Objective-C has some serious flaws.

Like?

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

You just got laughed at by thousands of real world developers.

"Objective-C has some serious flaws"

You could really benefit from keeping your mouth shut.

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's S-L-O-W.

and

it has no GC

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use a garbage collector, just don't do retain/release.

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Boggle.

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

My goodness! Apple's paid agents (that apple hires to pollute blogs) work round the clock!

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[jcr]

Objective-C has some serious flaws. ..and also some compelling advantages. Take a look at how NSUndoManager was implemented, and please tell me how to do the same thing in Java, C#, C++ or whatever your favorite language may be.

-jcr

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[Anonymous Coward]

You lose, dimwit.

I am implementing my companies entire game development tool chain in Cocoa. Unfucking believable how fast and powerful it is.

Here's a clue for you dummy:

Cocoa bindings...

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[cablepokerface]

Take a look at how NSUndoManager was implemented

In VB it's implemented like this:

SendKeys{"CONTROL+Z"}.

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[mattyrobinson69]

I respect you, since the syntax for sendkeys is wrong, therefore you probably dont use VB.

i wish i didn't know VB, and learned a proper language :(.

Must learn delphi. must learn delphi...

Re:Apple could really benefit...

[chochos]

Ah but ObjC has some really cool features as well. I've yet to see something like ObjC categories in C# or Java. THAT is what I miss the most of ObjC (I've moved to C# AND Java, at first because of the WebObjects move to Java, but now I've moved over to J2EE, abandoning WO, which has lost one of its coolest features - being written in ObjC).

Re:For Linux?

[Junichiro Koizumi]

You should be killed.

Sincerely, Junichiro Koizumi.

you have got to be joking

[Anonymous Coward]

macs interface is a piece of one mouse button designed crap! keep that shit away from linux!

Re:you have got to be joking

[finkployd]

macs interface is a piece of one mouse button designed crap!

Really, cause I'm using my mac right now with a three button mouse and it works perfectly. I would never use a one button mouse with it.

Free Clue: The interface works perfectly (much better in fact) with a multiple button mouse.

Finkployd

Re:you have got to be joking

[martinX]

Only 3 buttons? Ha! Me, my G4 and my 5-button MS intelli-rodent spit on your measly 3 buttons!

Re:you have got to be joking

[Bull999999]

Only 3 buttons? Ha! Me, my G4 and my 5-button MS intelli-rodent spit on your measly 3 buttons!

My 7 button MS Wireless intelli-rodent can beat up your 5-button MS intelli-rodent! :)

Re:you have got to be joking

[jrockway]

Actually it's perfectly usable with a one button mouse. Scroll with up-and-down arrows, click and hold for a context menu. The interface is designed for a one-button mouse. I do like my scroll wheel, but when I don't have it I survive. Same with expose: nice to have on your mouse, but my keybindings are fine too!

Mac OS X is so fucking great... (tabbed browsing is now just an annoyance thanks to expose...)

Re:you have got to be joking

[Incoherent07]

So... uh... what are the other two buttons for?

Re:you have got to be joking

[The Infamous Grimace]

Yeah, I used to use a MS Intellipoint Optical Wheelmouse with my 2 macs, still use it on one. However, for my old laptop I've gone back to the ol' one-button. Why? I've decided that the original paradigm is better; the keyboard has far more functionality than any mouse, with the exception of the scroll wheel.

In Safari, if you want to open a link in another tab, just command-click. In another window? Alt-command-click. Want a menu? Ctrl-click.

For dealing with files, open 2 finder windows in column view, and stack them on the screen. Want to cut-n-paste? Drag-n-drop. Want to copy? Alt drag-n-drop. Want a shortcut? Alt-command drag-n-drop.

The more I use a one-button mouse, the more I like it. YMMV.

(tig)

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

The reason behind the 1 button mouse was that it was painfully clear what the 1 button was to be used for. If you wanted "right button style functionality," hold down the option key and click.

Studies done at the time indicated that people made more mistakes with multi button mice and mice with multi button interfaces took longer for the user to accomplish what they want to do (because of the mistakes and confusion about what the other button was for).

For me, it is pretty damn obvious that the mouse button is used to provide the "primary operations" for the item clicked on. Holding down the option key when clicking to extend into "options" for the item makes perfect sense to me.

What really is the big deal with people's obsession on multi button mice? Honestly, I don't get it.

Re:you have got to be joking

[ErichTheWebGuy]

So... uh... what are the other two buttons for?

Whateeeeeeeever you want em to do ;)

Re:you have got to be joking

[Bull999999]

It better allows you to do a one handed web surfing... for educational purposes, of course.

Re:you have got to be joking

[Anonymous Coward]

Studies done at the time indicated that people made more mistakes with multi button mice

I might buy this, for total newbies who haven't learned which button is which.

and mice with multi button interfaces took longer for the user to accomplish what they want to do

Maybe true for total newbies. As a general statement, I don't buy it.

I use all three of my mouse buttons, and the one that's actually a scroll wheel, I also use a lot as a scroll wheel. You can't persuade me that I'll be faster using one hand to bang a particular key on the keyboard while the other hand clicks is faster than just hitting a single mouse button with a finger that is resting on that button. I don't buy it.

Re:you have got to be joking

[prockcore]

What really is the big deal with people's obsession on multi button mice? Honestly, I don't get it.

You have no scroll wheel. How can you live without a scroll wheel?

For me, it's pretty damn obvious that the button I click with my primary finger is for primary options. I don't see how anyone could be confused by a 3 button mouse unless they're a retarded monkey.

Re:you have got to be joking

[CountBrass]

Care to explain this comment?

tabbed browsing is now just an annoyance thanks to expose..

I use tabbed browsing and Expose (and Desktop Manager) and your comment made no more sense to me than someone saying "loud dogs are now just annoyance thanks to my new wrist-watch".

Re:you have got to be joking

[Mika_Lindman]

In Safari, if you want to open a link in another tab, just command-click. In another window? Alt-command-click. Want a menu? Ctrl-click.

Er.. So how do you open the pic of that cute girl to a new tab while browsing one-handed?

Pr0n aside, how does one handed person use a single button mouse?

Re:you have got to be joking

[ambrosine10]

I don't understand how anybody can get by with less than 3 mouse buttons. The scroll-wheel, middle-clicking for opening and closing new tabs in Firefox, mouse gestures and context menus with the right button - I hate Ctrl and Alt clicking. The more buttons the better I say.

Re:you have got to be joking

[slittle]

Multibutton rodents are as close as we're likely to get to a practical "cyber glove" anytime soon.

You need to think in 3D. Instead of text, icons and a mouse, think of objects and the mouse as an extension of your hand. You have multiple fingers and a wrist - the buttons and wheel(s) are the multiple ways to can hold and fiddle with objects.

Seriously.. single button mice and classic MacOS are why everyone hates Mac users. They suck - everyone knows this, and Maclots violently insist(ed) they don't. Mac people finally admitted as much even back in the OSX beta days, vowing to never go back. Soon as Apple comes out with a multibutton 'elegant' mouse, you watch them all disown their previous '1 button forevah!!!!' ways.

Re:you have got to be joking

[Anonymous Coward]

In Safari, if you want to open a link in another tab, just command-click. In another window? Alt-command-click. Want a menu? Ctrl-click.

Which is effectively a four-button mouse, with chording, that you have to operate using both hands. But somehow Apple consider this to be the user-friendly way to do things...

Re:you have got to be joking

[Anonymous Coward]

Studies done at the time indicated that people made more mistakes with multi button mice

You negect to mention that these studies are from the 1980s.

The "facts on the ground" in 2004 are that 95%+ computers have 2+ button mice, and everyone has adapted. The only people still confused about 2 buttons are the Mac users.

Re:you have got to be joking

[johannesg]

What you really need is a one-button mouse that contains alt, shift, and control keys, so you don't have to reach for the keyboard all the time. Hey, we could be onto something revolutionary here!

Re:you have got to be joking

[palad1]

One mouse trackpad on my powerbook makes me want to kill someone. Control clicking is so unnatural with the pad, I had to buy an external logitech mouse (metallic as well :]), but then, I hardly right click at all, as the option key is far easier to reach when both my hands are further away one from the other... still, 2 buttons are double plus good for q3 :)

Re:you have got to be joking

[Val314]

ok, small story from my office:

While i cant be without my 5 Button Mouse some others are confused by those buttons.
I've seen people middle-Click on something and nothing happens (that was with a 3-Button Mouse). or using 2 Buttons at once (left & Middle) and stuff like this.

Re:you have got to be joking

[antin]

I wish I had mod points - very very true.

Re:you have got to be joking

[The Infamous Grimace]

Pr0n aside, how does one handed person use a single button mouse?

Sticky keys. It's in System Prefs->Universal Access. Although I would recommend a multi-button mouse. Remember, I'm talking about what works for me.
One thing that would be nice is if Apple further implemented the click-n-hold feature, as with the Dock, for other items, such as hyperlinks (click-n-hold a Dock icon and a menu will appear).

(tig)

Re:you have got to be joking

[Trurl's Machine]

Er.. So how do you open the pic of that cute girl to a new tab while browsing one-handed?

Personally, I don't think that tabs fit well to the one-button paradigm... and I don't use them. Expose makes them just redundant. "Pr0n aside", there are websites with javascript purposedly blocking out the right mouse button, to make it more difficult to save the image of the cute girl to your local collection of, ummmm, images. On a Mac it's simple - just drag'n'drop the image onto the icon of your "~/Pictures/pr0n" folder, and their silly javascript can just kiss the round backside of your iMac.

Re:you have got to be joking

[dan the person]

The studies done for the orignal macintosh that came to those conclusions was for first time computer users.

Which is quite understandable. But most people these days aren't first time computer users, hence the popularity of multi button mice

Re:you have got to be joking

[The Infamous Grimace]

Which is effectively a four-button mouse, with chording, that you have to operate using both hands. But somehow Apple consider this to be the user-friendly way to do things...

Yes it is, for me at least. It's easier to keep one hand on the keyboard and hold down on one or two extra keys as needed than trying to click-n-thumbclick-n-pinkyclick or whatever. I have big hands. Why would I want to contort one around a multi-button mouse when I have 105+ extra keys that I can access with the other?

(tig)

Re:you have got to be joking

[TomorrowPlusX]

Absolutely. I gave up my three-button intellimouse for the original single-button too. It not only "feels" like a better mouse -- as in more solid and better tracking -- but the Mac OS is meant to be used by a person with the left hand on the keyboard and the right on the mouse. It just works better that way.

However, I keep a 3 button for when I use blender :/

Re:you have got to be joking

[JCholewa]

> tabbed browsing is now just an annoyance thanks to expose..
> I use tabbed browsing and Expose (and Desktop Manager) and your comment made no more sense to
> me than someone saying "loud dogs are now just annoyance thanks to my new wrist-watch".

I have to agree with you. I use MDI ("tabs") in web browsers for the advantage of session management. Right now, I have forty web pages opened in Opera, six opened in Mozilla, and an assortment of miscellaneous apps -- this is simply normal for me, just as closing every existing window before starting up a new application is normal for many home MS Windows users. If I were running OS X (or Metisse on Linux) and I activated the Expose feature without the benefit of MDI in my web browsers, then all I'd see is a bunch of little incomprehensible dots on the screen.

--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/

Re:you have got to be joking

[yandros]

For your mac laptop, take a look at uControl. It won't totally negate your desire for a scroll wheel, but it will cut it down quite a bit. Plus, it's open source.

Re:you have got to be joking

[dasmegabyte]

Actually, it's more like saying "this pencil is an annoyance thanks to my new pen." Expose and tabbed browsing are two completely different things. I use expose, tabbed browsing, multiple tab sets switched via Option - ~, program hiding, etc. The whole point of OS X is that it gives you a SHITLOAD of options for easily managing your desktop, use the ones that work best for you!

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

Many casual users of computers, approach the computer with a bad case of confusion and may just feel like a retarded monkey.

My Uncle is one of them.

I initially wasn't a big fan of the scroll wheel because I thought the UI already should support that functionality with up and down arrows and the page up and page down keys.

When it's there I use it though.

The design of the input device truly needs to be done not in an ad hoc basis but terribly well thought out and simplicity and ease of use needs to balance flexibility and power.

Since I am feeling rather retarded this morning, please explain to me the purpose of each button on your 3 button mouse?

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

Don't you see that the complexity of what you have just described is a little more than what might make sense to someone approaching the computer?

What makes sense about a middle click opening? Wasn't that what a double click was for?

When did that change and why didn't anyone tell me?

This results in a confusing metaphor that is not consistent across apps. Consistency and predictability are primary concepts in an effective cross product user interface.

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

"They suck, everyone knows this"

Why?

I have been using computers since 1979, TRS-80, Apple II, Dos, Mac, Vax, PDP 11, Windows, OS X, win 2k, xp, etc..

Since everyone knows why they suck, I would like one of everyone to tell me why they do.

My original question was "I don't get it." Please explain this to me.

I'm using OS X and Win 2k at this moment and I can see the 2 button mouse as an excuse to get by in a poorly designed UI.

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

AHA!

Quake! Right click to zoom :]

I have a 3 button logitech mouse and a 2 button I use for quake. Funny thing is that I never used all 3 buttons on the logitech and the only reason I went to the 2 button was because of the lack of complexity. left = shoot, right = zoom.

I could see a place in a non game UI if the right button's functionality was consistent between apps. As in the right button = options for the thing clicked on. However in windows, consistency is rare in many cases.

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

BINGO. That's my point - what is obvious to any user regarding which button does what?

If you're going to do a multi button mouse, the task of each button must be painfully obvious to any user and the user interfaces must be consistent in the uses of these buttons, otherwise usage becomes confusing and irritating all too easily.

Re:you have got to be joking

[benjcurry]

Whatever. :) With a multi-button mouse, you get equivalents to all that, plus: middle-click opens link in a new tab, right-click context menu. Invaluable in my opinion, to have a fully functional mouse-driven interface. I want to read and article using only one input device while adequately operating the browser. This is not possible with a one-button mouse. Period.

Re:you have got to be joking

[benjcurry]

Sorry, but for a moderately competent user, this is just plain wrong. I've fallen in love with middle-click (scroll wheel) to open new tabs in Firefox. It IS easier. It IS more convenient.

Re:you have got to be joking

[benjcurry]

Button 1 (left-click) actives the default action for what you are clicking on. Button 2 (right-click) opens a context menu for what you are clicking on. Button 3 (scroll wheel) is variable: in Firefox, for instance, a click on a link will open it in a tab. The third button will always, when applicable, allow you to scroll, though, either with a wheel roll or click-then-drag move.

Re:you have got to be joking

[mattkime]

the day apple releases a multi-button mouse is the day steve jobs trades his black turleneck for a polo shirt with a stitched logo

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

Firefox is but one application. And though this may be great for Firefox, the idea of a ui element it that it work the same way across everything - or at least in a predictable way.

Of course here, we get your love of efficiency and power in one app and different or unknown behaviour in others? Do we move from standard predictable consistent ui elements to "the best application for each app"? If so, how far do we go before it gets too cumbersome for people besides those who invented the convention??

Re:you have got to be joking

[The Infamous Grimace]

Invaluable in my opinion, to have a fully functional mouse-driven interface. I want to read and article using only one input device while adequately operating the browser. This is not possible with a one-button mouse. Period.

Some might argue otherwise.

Just imagine what can be done 'tween the button-down and button-up events.

(tig)

Re:you have got to be joking

[ambrosine10]

Sure, for newbies. But I'm not talking about newbies. Power users need lots of mouse buttons. Computers aren't just for newbies you know. Middle clicks are for opening NEW tabs. If you want to open in the same tab, you use a left-click. Nothing too complicated. I left out the 4th and 5th side buttons for moving back and forward in web pages. I don't think any of this is "confusing". It's highly configurable and you can always change the settings if you like. I use 5 buttons and a scroll wheel, and honestly now I don't know how I lived without it.

Re:you have got to be joking

[azav]

Interesting. I'm big on interface consistency between applications and yes, on windows, I do right click, but on my mac I just memorize command keys and I've been using Mouse interfaces since 1985.

Interesting though. I never really thought of switching my mind set to using the input device differently depending on the application. Hmmm.

Re:you have got to be joking

[a24061]

here are websites with javascript purposedly blocking out the right mouse button

Fortunately there's a Firefox extension called "Allow Right-Click" that disables this javascript weakness.

Mono has come very far in a short period of time

[Ars-Fartsica]

Congrats to the Mono crew - from announcement to 1.0, they have covered a lot of ground in a short period of time and if they are perceived to be encumbered by patent issues (note I say perceived), they are not encumbered by bad-source-practices that is still keeping Java locked out of some domains.

You can use real apps right now with Gtk# - the Muine music player and the Blam RSS reader are functional and mostly stable...there are many other examples.

Apple could really benefit.From obsolete arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

"Programmers generally like C# and .NET for application development, and Objective-C has some serious flaws."

Fortunately they never give any examples. Unless you consider "obsolete" a "serious flaw".

Re:For Linux?

[Amiga Lover]

I want Mac OS's interface on Linux! I've done what I consider to be as good of a job as I can, but it's not the best knock-off in the world.

They should be concentrating on making quick & efficient UIs like the Amiga had, or the early Macs, not bloat upon bloat upon bloat.

Both the original mac and Amiga UI systems fit inside 512k RAM or less, leaving everything else for the App's functionality. When some of those early machines were expanded from 68000 CPUs to 68040s and 32MB of ram or more they flew faster than any 2 or 3GHz cpu in GUI feel. Nothing could outclass them

So why do we need this bloat?

Windows forms sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Really. You'd think Microsoft could come up with something better than the grid-based layout they have been since forever. Once you start using a constraint based layout kit like Gtk, you never want to go back to the stone age and have to manually write window resize code and manually adjust the sizes of controls individually. I'm hoping to try out Gtk# soon for projects now that we are starting to use .Net as a development platform.

Re:Windows forms sucks

[RodeoBoy]

There is no need to write resize code in .Net. It's obvious that you have never tried WinForms in .Net, I dought if you even know how to program. A just a waste of time responding to a coward anyway.

Re:Windows forms sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It is obvious you've never tried Gtk, Qt, Swing, or any modern GUI toolkit. Anchoring is not the same, nor is a substitute, for a rendering engine capable of managing the complex behaviour necessary to handle window resizes and control resizes (for localization and user-controllable font changes).

Re:Windows forms sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I have extensive Swing, GTK, Qt and .NET GUI development experience.

This is my experience/facts:

1) .NET doesn't have several layout managers, but this is relatively easy to plug in.

2) For REALLY complex GUI's, anchoring is superior to any constraint based layout manager. Because it gives you a level of control at dialog unit level, yet the flexibility to place things relatively.

3) "Dialog units" solve scaling issues wrt. font and system gui element changes.

4) SWT (a Swing alternative) has even better anchoring support as the anchor can be both relative and absolute.

Re:Windows forms sucks

[IamTheRealMike]

Dude, I can't agree. Dialog units are an awful hack Microsoft added to cover up for the lack of design they put into the dialog manager originally. Anchoring is not superior to constraint-based layout once you take into account things like translations which can radically modify the size of strings at runtime. I think you equate anchoring with "flexible" because you are used to dropping controls at arbitrary points. This sort of flexibility just shoots you in the foot later though. Taking the time to learn constraint-based layout - wierd though it is at first - will not be wasted.

Re:Windows forms sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right, you guys clearly haven't looked at .NET yet, everything is constraint based. More layout managers to come in the .NET 2.0 release as well.

Re:Windows forms sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're telling me that this can't be done with a custom layout manager? I've got several to choose from to handle flowing controls, resizing, etc. Do you have a reference to this magical constraint-based layout?

Gtk# Rocks

[pherthyl]

Even back in the 0.8 days, I had very few problems making a medium sized app (~4000 lines), developed entirely under linux with Mono. Everything worked on the first try when I ran it on windows with .NET.

Now that's true cross platform ability. Even with Java I've never had it work that flawlessly. Thanks Miguel and Mike Kerster and the rest of the Mono team. You guys rock.

Re:Gtk# Rocks

[Tim C]

I had very few problems making a medium sized app (~4000 lines)

With all due respect, I've worked with application config files that were larger than that. In the grand scheme of things, 4000 loc is pretty small.

Re:Gtk# Rocks

[alext]

But most people will be doing this the other way around (starting with Dotnet development tools) and I doubt if their experience will be as lucky. Almost certainly not as lucky as mine in running a large Java GUI package developed for Windows on Linux.

Unfortunately for them Miguel and co. are rowing back from claims of Dotnet compatibility, which was the justification for the whole Mono exercise in the first place (as opposed to cloning Java, evolving Perl/Python etc.)

Re:Gtk# Rocks

[dasmegabyte]

4000 lines is not a medium sized application. It's about right for one fully functional form. Our data layer alone is 20,000 lines (thanks to virtual methods to manage data via reflection, automatic change detection and connection management).

Re:Gtk# Rocks

[LetterJ]

Yeah. I looked at that and then went back to the 3500 lines of Javascript that a single screen in my current project is dictating (and yes, every line is necessary given the requirements) and wondered at the scale that some folks work on.

Re:Gtk# Rocks

[Luscious868]

With absolutely no respect, your a fucking idiot.

Re:Gtk# Rocks

[pherthyl]

You're right, I should have said small app.

But lines of code isn't everything. I've worked on applications with ~100,000 LOC and about half of that code was either dead or could have easily been eliminated with a bit more thought/design and not as much copy paste which always seems to be rampant among projects like this.

One small leap for Mono. One giant leap for bias.

[Anonymous Coward]

"they are not encumbered by bad-source-practices that is still keeping Java locked out of some domains."

Uh, huh. And just what domains are "Java locked out of" that .Net (and by extension Mono) NOT locked out of?

This is great

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Kudos to the Mono developers, what they have accomplished is no easy feat!

I just wonder when Microsoft will try to say, "See? We are the innovators. Look at mono! They followed our .NET framework in a desperate attempt to copy it!"

While it may be true that Mono was released after .NET, there is ample evidence that open source software is far more innovative than anything Microsoft has put out (with the possible exception of this useless piece of trash.

The point is that no matter what massive strides are made here (and they are great, and we are better off for having them), we must remain vigilant against people that would rather dominate the world than contribute to humanity.

Re:This is great

[OmegaBlac]

I just wonder when Microsoft will try to say, "See? We are the innovators."

Where have you been for the past +10 years? Microsoft has been falsely preaching that innovator crap for the longest time.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that no matter what.....

The point is that no matter what you post about, as long as it is Anti-Microsoft, you will get modded up.

Karma whore.

Re:This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Falsely?

Actually they have been innovators (and copers both) for many years. Direct X anyone?

Linux zealots like yourself have also been spewing anti-microsoft crap for the longest time as well...

Does themes work with Mono's winforms ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Xbox Winforms Theme (seems to be written in C# ?)

Gtk# Rocks-Scaling errors.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even back in the 0.8 days, I had very few problems making a medium sized app (~4000 lines), developed entirely under linux with Mono."

I wasn't aware that a Graphical "Hello World" was so big.

Re:Gtk# Rocks-Scaling errors.

[Anonymous Coward]

How can the parent be modded insightful? It's either funny or very stupid...

Re:Gtk# Rocks-Scaling errors.

[MemoryDragon]

4000 lines is not a medium sized app it is a better hello world. I recently deployed an info system, with around 30.000 loks from ourself and around 100.000 more from the underlying framework. It was developed on Linux on a Blackdown VM, later ported to the IBM vm and then deployed under Windows Linux and AIX. There was exactly one problem, and that one was caused by a bug in the IBM VM. Speaking about portable... three platforms covered one line of code had to be changed in around 150.000 loks. Now that is portable.

I think the world has finally left me behind

[Brandybuck]

I think the world has finally left me behind. I just don't get this obsession with .NET. Even the Java ecstacies back in the mid 90's weren't this enthusiastic. There are fifty stories on related topics on OSNews, and .NET evangelists are work are sprouting up everywhere like dandelions. Hell, Miguel can't take a dump these days without Slashdot reporting it.

Why the obsession with Microsoft technology? What's it going to give me, an embedded systems developer? Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product? Frankly it appears to me that the world has gone stark raving mad.

Has there EVER been any language or framework that generated so much unbridled enthusiasm before? Did they lace the spec with speed or something? I'm not doubting that these various Microsoft cloning projects have some merit, but some of you guys are going way over the top.

I guess I'm just an old fashioned fuddy duddy who should stick with old fashioned languages, frameworks and music.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[jcr]

Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product?

Funny, I was just reading a very good essay on this subject earlier today.

My favorite paragraph:

Why does he think this? Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.

Replace "java" with "COBOL" if you're talking about thirty years ago, "C++" if you're talking about 15 years ago, or ".NET" if you're talking about this year.

-jcr

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Osty]

Why the obsession with Microsoft technology?

.NET is pretty damned good, and people recognize that. The few who don't are the normal "Anything but Microsoft" zealots. It's not perfect, but very good and getting better.

What's it going to give me, an embedded systems developer?

Absolutely nothing, but you're not the target demographic.

Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product?

.NET is the hot new buzzword, and your VPs aren't smart enough to realize that it's not suitable for embedded realtime applications.

Frankly it appears to me that the world has gone stark raving mad.

From your perspective, that may be true, but then you're looking at the world from the eyes of a real-time, embedded systems developer where you work with a limited set of known hardware under strict time and resource constraints. .NET isn't for you. That doesn't mean the world has actually gone mad, just that there's more to the world than that which applies to you.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

> The few who don't are the normal "Anything but Microsoft" zealots.

The FEW ? You are either full of shit or far from reality. I only see a FEW people overhyping MONO the MAJORITY simply hates it. I clearly know that more people HATE MONO than loving it.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it this way.

For years, developers targetting the windows platform had two (real) choices VB or C/C++.

With C/C++ you had two choices. Use the win32 API directly and/or use MFC. With VB, creation of GUI apps was made as simple as possible, at the expense of a cumbersome language.

Throw COM into the mix, complex threading models and API interface du-jour and the bottom line is that Windows developers have been guinea pigs feeding on inconsistent standards for 15 years.

-----Enter Java

Finally, a language that brings OOP to the masses without having to learn complex semantics regarding memory allocation. It also eliminates the cumbersome and overly complex nature of STL in C++.

The drawbacks were twofold: Early java adopters didn't have the rich GUI IDE's present in VB5/6 and VC++/DevStudio. Like it or not, it hurt producitivty, at least in the short term. Translation: corporate america didn't warm up to the idea immediately.

Another drawback to java was the rampant verbosity of the language. There are those that do believe that enum's and value types are GOOD things.

Then you had the immaturity of Java GUI toolkits that made 'rich client' apps look like they were written by high school script kiddies.

---- Enter .NET/C#

Goodbye VB6. Goodbye VC++. Hello managed code. Goodbye MFC. Hello (working) garbage collection. Goodbye complex threading models. Hello full-featured clone of Java.* renamed as System.*.

C# as a language is a dream. It contains most of the language features that I had been dying for. It is readable, quick to code in and is put together in a consistent manner.

There is very little about C# that is better than java. But for windows-based shops, Java can't hold a candle to c#/.net.

It isn't a religous war. You may not like microsoft's policies or busines practices. And they certainly didn't invent the concept of a managed environment or one-up Java.

While the typical slashdotter is foaming at the mouth about MS, .NET and how we are all bunch of idiots, I am busy writing code for a good company that just happens to base their operations on windows.

Imagine the ability to take an ASP.NET app that you RAD-developed using MS VS.NET tools and cross-compiling it in Mono, running the whole thing under apache using mod_mono.

You would have the benefit of a killer IDE (VS.NET), a rock-solid back end (Apache) and an application framework that works without headache!

That is why **I** use MS.NET and MONO. I don't particularly care for MS, but I am smart enough to know what side of the bread is buttered.

Bottom line: Sometimes you have to get past the religious zealotry of the pro-linux/anti-ms crowd (ie. slashdot) and see something for it's good.

This isn't a perfect world, and MS usually sucks, but .NET is cool. Linux is cool. Mono is cool.

Lets marry them together and reap the benefits.

Standing at the back of room pouting isn't helping advance your cause.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[DAldredge]

Most of the people on /. bitching about Mono haven't code an app that is mission critical in their entire life, if they have coded at all.

Notice how many of them are Anonymous?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[dekeji]

The key differences between C# and Java are philosophy and licenses.

Java's philosophy is built around WORA and enforced standardization, courtesy of Sun Microsystems.

C# is just a language, like C or C++--it comes with a small standard library, but what you do with it beyond that is up to you. C# has a language standard, and an open one at that, but the degree to which you follow that is up to you.

Whether that is good or bad is a matter of needs and preferences. I think the level of enthusiasm C# and Mono have generated should tell you which way the wind is blowing.

Note that Mono is not just about cloning Microsoft. Mono is building an entire platform; part of that platform is Microsoft compatibility libraries, but most of it is actually based on open source APIs and libraries.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be careful with your assumptions. Even if I am one of these Anonymous people you are refering to I on the otherhand have programming experience for over 24 years now. Started with Machine language in the far early 80's so I basicly know what mission critical programming is. I say from myself to know quite a lot of TRUE programming and not the brickbuilder stuff like Visual Basic coders who simply take components X, Y, Z and build a house out of it. I certainly do see advantages here but saying that most Anonymous people on /. are no coders is arrogance par excellance.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Brandybuck]

.NET is pretty damned good, and people recognize that.

I understand that this is a rather novel concept under Windows, and if I were a Windows application developer I might just go along with it. It's certainly less painful than MFC/COM+. But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.

Absolutely nothing, but you're not the target demographic.

Okay, imagine I also write end user applications for Linux/Unix users. What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not? What does it give me that non-Ximian C/GTK/GNOME does not? What does it give me that RubyQT and wxPython do not?

Or to put it another way, why should I jump on the .NET bandwagon when Java is here today and Parrot is just around the corner?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Brandybuck]

Mono is building an entire platform

Wait, I already have a platform! Heck, I've got a whole slew of platforms to choose from. Why should I throw them all away for a new unfinished one?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[DAldredge]

No, it isn't. People who could code would be able to come up with slightly more logical arguments than most AC's do.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[WaltFrench]

The fact that Microsoft initiated this project is a significant negative to me (risk of having the rug pulled out) but the only negative against the opportunity to have a multi-language (I'm a sucker for the strong type- and functionality assertion checking that Pascal first brought, and Eiffel now offers), multi-platform environment.

That means that when the NAG releases their intricate math routines in .Net, I could use them without worrying about FORTRAN vs. C vs VB etc... develop anywhere (?) for implementation many years into the future on unknown platforms. Mix'n'match developer familiarity with 3rd party libraries.

This is just my perspective as a business person who doesn't code nearly as much as I used to, but wants to leave a legacy that others can build on (and wants to freeload on the best & brightest of what came before). .Net is a slam-dunk only-way-to-do-it choice if the Mono guys are only half as good as they seem to be, and if MS is only twice as evil as it seems to be.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[DAldredge]

Who is saying you should throw them away? How does the existance of Mono harm you?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[groomed]

Well, as the anonymous poster above already mentioned, you need to consider what came out of Microsoft before .NET; a confused jumble of acronyms and paradigms with the combined lifespan of a Coke bottle.

.NET really is Microsoft's first serious contribution to the computing culture (as opposed to industry) at large. It synthesises many of the ideas of the past decade in a very clean and logical way. And it's remarkably open: not in the sense that it's endorsed by some standards body, but in the sense that it actually makes an effort to integrate with other technologies -- through the pervasive use of XML, the Common Language Runtime and the numerous hooks in the class library, all the way down to the fact that the C# compiler will actually not explode when encountering a file with \n line termination rather than \r\n.

.NET is a heavy-duty framework that will be around in some form for decades to come, and it's pretty good. It's like Java but less insular, it's like C but less tedious.

What generates all the hubbub, of course, is that something like this is coming from Microsoft. Think of it as a celebration party. What's being celebrated is that Microsoft is finally coming of age.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Why ? There is no need and requirement to explain everything logically or having a requirement to give a scientific explaination about things once someone has read 20 books. It should be enough for the majority of people when someone says "I do not like it". Same with drinks or clothes, not everyone likes to wear or drink everything. And people often do not explain these things, they simply like or dislike it. In my 24 years of programming and I can tell you that I made quite a lot starting from Z80 asm, 680x0 asm, 6510 asm, PowerPC asm, C, Java, VB, Perl, Rexx, Logo and so on that there still are languages that I do like and languages that I hate. It's the same stuff for people liking Linux over BSD or Windows over Linux. Just because you are prefering MONO and now show up here like a preacher telling everyone else to like MONO too because you do so doesn't make it a better solution for everyone. MONO is just one solution out of many solutions, there are people who like it and swear on it and there are people who simply can't stand it. I for my own count to the last named ones. I also believe (which of course makes me an individual) that MONO doesn't really fit into the UNIX/Linux world it somehow has this alien touch and feel. For me MONO is simply an overhyped technology that will soon be deprecated anyways because some new fresh shit shows up that everyone starts hyping the hell out. I have seen so many languages showing up and disappearing again (or not used anymore) and my daily experience for over 24 years tells me that people still stay on the old solid languages because they have proven to work and work perfectly for them.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah blah.. you sound like an MS salesman. You make .Net sound like it's the greatest thing since sliced toast. I think you discredit competitors too much, which is too bad. MS botches up an awful lot of its products (particularly ones that developers must put up) which are outdated, bug-ridden, and sometimes over-engineered (like Windows' Registry). That's because MS sells it's products to the higher ups (i.e. they spend an awful lot of money making their shit look pretty), not to the people who are forced to use MS's crap.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Jord]

Anyone who thinks it is a good idea to code a mission critical application using Mono needs to find another job. No large company out there is going to trust a mission critical application to an untest language implementation like Mono. Perhaps in a few years but not yet.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Osty]

I understand that this is a rather novel concept under Windows, and if I were a Windows application developer I might just go along with it. It's certainly less painful than MFC/COM+. But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.

All I can offer is that C# and .NET are the current "cool" things, and thus Unix (read: Linux) developers don't want to be left out in the cold. That may change in the future. It may not. Mono may mature to the point where cross-platform .NET applications Just Work (tm) without ugly GTK# stuff (GTK# is fine for Linux, but GTK on Windows sucks, and I can't imagine GTK# would be any better -- besides, the look & feel is all off, and themes can only do so much to correct that).

Okay, imagine I also write end user applications for Linux/Unix users. What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not? What does it give me that non-Ximian C/GTK/GNOME does not? What does it give me that RubyQT and wxPython do not?

Basically, ask yourself why you would use Java rather than C/C++/Qt/KDE/GTK/GNOME or a scripting language like Ruby or Python, and then realize that C# fixes many annoyances from Java (int is both Object-derived and a value type in C#, unlike int vs. Integer in Java; You can create user-defined value types in C#; C#'s generics implementation is much more robust than Java's syntactical sugar hack that translates everything to Object during compilation; etc) and adds new language features (attributes, properties, events, etc). Java and C# are garbage-collected, which makes them more secure by default than C/C++ (with respect to memory management issues, anyway -- you can certainly still write insecure code in Java or C#). They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode, .NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages).

Or to put it another way, why should I jump on the .NET bandwagon when Java is here today and Parrot is just around the corner?

.NET fixes a number of shortcomings of Java. Also, the C# language and common runtime are truly open (ECMA standardization), unlike Java. Parrot has been "just around the corner" for years, and nothing I've seen has indicated that it will actually "come around the corner" any time soon. If you want to wait, or build your software on top of ever-changing beta code, go ahead and use Parrot.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, Miguel can't take a dump these days without Slashdot reporting it.

I knew there was a reason I didn't get my news from other places.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[DAldredge]

HINT: Preview helps make your post readable and stop you from looking dumb. ;->

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop getting offensive. First lesson for you should be to accept other peoples opinion even if they differ from yours. I might be the Anonymous clueless as you like to make it look like but you are the Asshole with name :)

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[killjoe]

As long as there are people like you who look past all the sleazy and unethical things a company does then companies will continue to act sleazy and unethical.

MS knows that as long as they hand out the candy the masses will look past their assholeness. This makes them very happy.

As for me I choose not to give them any money. Just like I buy dolphin safe Tuna and shop downtown rather then wallmart. I know that every day and with every dollar I spend I can either choose to make the world a little better or a little worse. I realize that how I spend my money is infinately more powerful then how I vote and I take care in wielding that power for good.

It's all about my sense of right and wrong. Your sense of right and wrong are obviously different. You are willing to forgive all kinds of nasty behavior as long as the perpetrator sells you something nice.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[richardfish]

Because .NET is the only platform that exists today that allows you to re-use code written in other languages *without* writing a single interface function. Although Mono only has a C# compiler today, I believe others will follow with compilers/interpreters for (managed)C++, Obj C, Ruby, Python, Java, etc. So write your assembly in C# today, and re-use it tomorrow in Java, or give it to your co-working using C++.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Disagreed. One of our likely customers of a new .NET product (I'd call them large - with an over $800 million anual budget) is a big Novell shop, and when the possibility was mentioned that a application we're selling might run "on Novell's implementation of .NET running on Novell's Linux", they were very interested.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, your position is boring and childish, and not to mention, completely misguided (as Mono is not a Microsoft product).

If you've got nothing to add to the discussion about .NET except cut-n-paste "M# SI TEH EVIL!!!1" platitudes, stay the fuck out of the technical discussions and go whore your ABM crap in the numerous legal/strategy stories that slashdot posts. (not the same ac)

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

"on Novell's implementation of .NET running on Novell's Linux"

Hahahahaha what a pathetic sentence. Now how much has Novell actually done on MONO ? Oh wait they did a lot ! Oh no ! Wait ! they didn't ! They simply bought Ximian and MONO ! Oh wait MONO can't be bought it's Open Source! Oh wait MONO is Free Software free as in free beer as we speak, hacked together by many volunteer people. So what actually does Novell own ? And why can it be named Novell MONO when many volunteer non-Novell people work and contribute to it ? Doesn't this sound like a ripoff of volunteer work ?

Jesus this makes me so sick, you people should really open your eyes and stop speaking with your ass. As more I hear about Novell this and Novell that, Sun GNOME this and that as more I need to fucking puke.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the ability to take an ASP.NET app that you RAD-developed using MS VS.NET tools and cross-compiling it in Mono, running the whole thing under apache using mod_mono.

You would have the benefit of a killer IDE (VS.NET), a rock-solid back end (Apache) and an application framework that works without headache!

I'm looking at it the opposite way. Finally I can use the development tools that make me most efficient (emacs as an IDE) and program to the large Windows platform that has been pretty much out of reach to me.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.

RAD has always been a weak point of the Unix desktop, and Java has never been embraced by the Linux crowd for various reasons. (Its doubtful there's been a "exodus", just that some people stopped pounding in nails with a screwdriver when someone gave them a hammer.)

There's also the issue of "name brand" -- like it or not, .NET was more established in 5 minutes than RubyQT or wxPython will ever be. Mono also has the advantage of being a 1.0 release and not being vaporware, like Parrot is.

What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not?

Cheaper developers, shorter development cycles.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[True Grit]

They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode, .NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages)

WRONG.

Jeez, how many times am I going to see this claim repeated over and over? Perl and Python ARE NOT INTERPRETED LANGUAGES! They both compile to a bytecode (intermediate) language which is then interpreted, just like Java/C#, and thus share the same advantages you mentioned. Python I know was a bytecode compiled language from its very beginning, it was never an interpreted language, and Python at least has Psycho, which is a kind of just-in-time compiler for Python bytecode, which can convert a lot of Python code (but not all) into native x86 instructions.

FYI, Parrot is a reimplementation of Perl's bytecode language and interpreter for Perl 6, not an initial introduction to Perl of a bytecode system, Perl may have had a bytecode system from the very beginning too, I just don't know for sure.

Why do you think Python has been ported to both Java (Jython) and Mono (IronPython)? Its happened because its not terribly hard to port Python's frontend (Python language interpreter) to Java or Mono's backend (the underlying bytecode language and interpreter and/or jit compiler).

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

I on the otherhand have programming experience for over 24 years now. Started with Machine language in the far early 80's so I basicly know what mission critical programming is

Experienced programmers generally don't say things "mission critical," and especially not the retarded "I basicly know what mission critical programming is." Managers talk like that. You sound like a guy who was made a manager just so the other programmers wouldn't have to keep fixing your shit.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Osty]

Jeez, how many times am I going to see this claim repeated over and over? Perl and Python ARE NOT INTERPRETED LANGUAGES! They both compile to a bytecode (intermediate) language which is then interpreted, just like Java/C#, and thus share the same advantages you mentioned. Python I know was a bytecode compiled language from its very beginning, it was never an interpreted language, and Python at least has Psycho, which is a kind of just-in-time compiler for Python bytecode, which can convert a lot of Python code (but not all) into native x86 instructions.

Care to provide some links? From what I can find, Python is interpreted, Perl is interpreted, and Ruby is interpreted. Now perhaps they mean something different when they things like, "Ruby is the interpreted scripting language," or, "Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language," but to me that says "interpreted". That the interpreter may JIT compile the script into a faster bytecode during runtime does not necessarily make the languages non-interpreted. Java and C# need to be explicitly compiled. Python, Perl, and Ruby do not.

So, care to back up your statements?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern versions of BASIC as well as JavaScript, VBS, etc also use the "bytecode" approach -- you would be hardpressed to find a 'scripting' language that doesn't in this day and age.

In short, you just threw a lengthy spaz attack over a pointless semantic distinction, or at worst a misplaced word. Try responding to Osty's actual point (hint: type system).

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

So when Miguel says in this very story that "top Mono developers that are now locked up in Provo Utah", you think that has nothing to do with Novell, and they are just fond of Utah or something? Dork.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps an advantage of Python might be the fact that if conversion to bytecode occurs at the execution site then the execution site can use whatever the most efficient source code to bytecode conversion that it has is, and do whatever optimisations are appropriate. With java the bytecode conversion is only as good as what happened at the compilation phase, meaning that if the conversion was buggy then the bytecode will be buggy and will exhibit bugs on all systems. In some ways making the execution site responsible for the compilation makes things more portable, and also better able to respond to improvements in bytecode creation techniques.

If the bytecode is just-in-time - i.e. it only creates currently executed pathways through the source code, then whilst the initial run through any pathway will be slower, it doesn't require that the whole code be compiled. Of course it would be possible to set the remote execution site to convert to bytecode by whatever allowable conversions are possible given the installation at that site.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Ed Avis]

However, Java bytecode is very close to Java source code. Apart from variable names and comments, you can usually reconstruct almost the exact same source code from the .class file. The interesting part is in the bytecode to native code translation and that does occur at the execution site.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said that I say "Mission Critical". I said that I know what Mission Critical things are because of these managers :) But who the fuck cares anyways.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[squiggleslash]

I think the thing that disappoints me most is not that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "That's decent".

No, the thing that disappoints me most is that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "There's no way we can do anything better, let's clone it instead."

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

The AC's post is perfectly readable. It's your short attention span that's the problem. Consider reading a book once in a while.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

we are the world, we are the.....

Cumbyeya

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

MS keeps getting better and better... the registry has been replaced by XML files. Your argument may have been valid in the days of Windows 98.

You probably have never written a line of code in your life... Maybe after summer vacation's over and you start 6th grade you'll realize that there are more fun things to do than troll on Slashdot, fscktard.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

For years, developers targetting the windows platform had two (real) choices VB or C/C++.

With C/C++ you had two choices. Use the win32 API directly and/or use MFC. With VB, creation of GUI apps was made as simple as possible, at the expense of a cumbersome language.

Wow, what stone have you been living under. Ever heard of Delphi? Or C++Builder? That's just to name two that pop to mind immediately.

Judging from the rest of your post, what we have here is a severe case of tunnel-vision.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[dasmegabyte]

The reason I like C# can be summed up very easily:

It's in the middle. It's syntax is simple enough for VB folks to learn, but flexible enough to powerful. It permits very rapid development with a snappy interface. It's pretty speedy to start with but leaves plenty of room for optimization.

And the community is GOOD. It's attracted some of the kind hearted Java gurus, but also some of the all-business MFC guys. The result is that there's plenty of free components, as well as good commercial components.

If you believe balance is more important than specialization, you'll love C#. I do.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Sloppy]

So when Miguel says in this very story that "top Mono developers that are now locked up in Provo Utah", you think that has nothing to do with Novell, and they are just fond of Utah or something?

No, it means they're in jail for stealing SCO code.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the thing that disappoints me most is not that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "That's decent".

No, the thing that disappoints me most is that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "There's no way we can do anything better, let's clone it instead."

Nobody's stopping you from doing better, let us know what you come up with. Oh, and it must be GPLed also.

...

Not so easy is it?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[mingot]

Please take a bath.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Abcd1234]

Umm, how 'bout this for Perl and this for Python. You should have looked harder.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[namekuseijin]

They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode, .NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages).

This is incorrect.

Perl, Python and Ruby standard implementations don't work by sluggishly interpreting each line of code everytime, like the old, putrid Basic interpreters from the 80's. They *do* compile the text source code to an internal, more convenient form: Python to bytecode and Ruby and Perl to an internal graph structure.

What do make Java and C# faster to execute is that type-checking is done at compile time, while in dynamically typed languages like those above the checking is done at runtime.

However, you get faster execution by having the developer of statically-compiled languages to explicitly declare every and all variables and parameters with the correct types, and this clearly is overkill for many application software.

Dynamically-typed languages get this burden off the developer by providing an execution environment which does exactly that at the cost of some execution overhead. The developer is then freed from the boresome and mechanical type declarations to worry about more important matters, such as actually making the code do something useful.

One would reply: "But you lost all benefits from getting correctly compiled code.", like as if the compilation stage doesn't report lots of errors in dynamically-typed languages or if the compilation itself was proof that the software is free of bugs and doesn't need to be thoroughly tested for runtime errors.

I ask, if you still need to go through the pain of testing thoroughly, what real benefits come from statically-compiled languages other than execution speed and perhaps some subtle runtime bugs difficult to discover? Is it worth to lose conciseness or development time just for it?

Here's a lovely trivial example in C#, using the standard .Net framework. This is how i declare a RadioButtonList webcontrol in ASP.NET:

using wctl = System.Web.UI.WebControls;
.
.
.
protected wctl.RadioButtonList lstACTY_CD_ID;

Well, that wasn't so bad, and then there's semantic autocompletion of symbols (something M$ marketing dept calls "Intellisense") -- if you're using a featurefull IDE, that is -- which automatically provide you with a quick selection and online documentation of all available completions or operations for the symbol just left of the cursor. Yes, writing type declarations with such tool is trivially easy, though reading through them afterwards and mantaining the code-base is not. Don't understand yet? Here's a very nasty, and yet very common taste of stupid statically typed syntax, following the same example above:

this.lstACTY_CD_ID.SelectedIndex = lstACTY_CD_ID.Items.IndexOf(lstACTY_CD_ID.Items.Fi ndByValue(accident.Type.ACTY_CD_ID.ToString()));

No, i'm not kidding: this is how you preselect some item in a radiobutton list given a particular value from the same datasource. That is real production code from an app i'm working on here at work. Well, at least, in the end it could be worse: like most other people doing .Net development, i could be writing .Net code in VB! Ouch!

So, in the end, it's all a matter of what you value most: development time versus execution time; verbosity vs. conciseness. Noting that execution time should, for most purposes, be made irrelevant in about 6 months and faster and cheaper hardware.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Brandybuck]

Noting that execution time should, for most purposes, be made irrelevant in about 6 months and faster and cheaper hardware.

I've been hearing this in regards to Java for the past ten years. Yet loading and executing a relatively feature rich Java application on my current 3.0GHz PIV is still an exercise in patience. Having used a .NET end-user application, I'm not seeing much difference.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Brandybuck]

Bingo! The ideas behind .NET are good. What puzzles me is the urgency to clone it.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[Brandybuck]

Because .NET is the only platform that exists today that allows you to re-use code written in other languages

I'm sure you mean this in positive sense, but it's not that great of an idea. For large projects it can actually be a hinderance.

Imagine going through one part of the code, written in language A, and running across a component written in language B, both using a library written in language C. Are you really expecting every member of that team to know those three languages fluently? Are you expecting unknown future maintainers to know all of them as well?

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[dekeji]

Wait, I already have a platform!

Yes, and with Mono, you can continue using that platform: Gnome and Gtk and all that good stuff.

Heck, I've got a whole slew of platforms to choose from. Why should I throw them all away for a new unfinished one?

Right: that's exactly the question you should ask about Java.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[True Grit]

So, care to back up your statements?

Besides the other poster who provided links showing Perl and Python are byte-compiled, you could have found out that Parrot is byte-compiled right from the front page on its website if you had bothered to do a simple google. Please try to be knowledgeable on a subject before pontificating on it in the future.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[True Grit]

You need to do some googling yourself.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[aztracker1]

Yeah, why there is so much COBOL and FORTRAN development today.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[aztracker1]

Componentization(sp) is supposed to be "black-box" you give it an input, and should get an appropriate output (or one of a list of possible exceptions/errors) ...

I realize that in real life that this isn't always the case, but the fact is, where a huge amount of development is today, this is the case anyhow...

Web application is built in language X under framework Y, communicating with datasource SQL, webservice SOAP, and file access (framework Y) ... now you have to output to browser HTML, and interact with JavaScript...

ASP.Net does a bit of a better job (imho) than anything before it.. and you can use VB.Net, C#, or a few other languages within the framework, not all is fully available in mono, but compiled libraries should work fine under mono, because of the CLI. I've worked with a lot of different web development platforms, and prefer asp.net.. JSP, and PHP are okay, but imo asp.net is simply nicer to use.

Extend this with GTK# and there is more to offer, though, I've been toying with using asp.net (good html/xml handling base) with server-based XUL ... seems like a good marraige.. the fact is, that it does offer a fair amount of choice, which isn't bad.. and good compatability with MS isn't a bad thing either... Give you a foothold into companies deploying on MS, and giving them options to migrate away without nearly as much hardship in the future.

Mono gives a good point of migration.. and if you've had to even try to migrate a ton of windows based code to work on other systems, it isn't fun.. just migrating from one rdbms to another is a painfull experience.. the toolset that mono offers is a nice thing to have.

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[NutscrapeSucks]

I'm not sure what your example has to do with typing. If anything it just demonstrates that the interface for ASP.NET list controls sucks (like they just copied the client DOM interface without thinking about how you'd actually use it. There's other problems too, like difficulty in putting a dummy "--Select--" item into a databound dropdown list.)

Anyway, one of the first things I did was subclass WebControls.DropDownList and some of the others so the selected value could be get/set from a property.

what real benefits come from statically-compiled languages other than execution speed and perhaps some subtle runtime bugs difficult to discover?

Dynamic typing was a major source of bugs in a larger, multi-developer ASP Classic project I worked on. "Subtle Runtime Bugs" were by far the most time-consuming issues.

Not all of that was the typing system, but instead the VB Programmer mentality of "Don't worry about types" -- but you could argue that dynamic typing just encourages that attitute. When the "right way" to work in dynamic typed languages is to litter your code with casts, why not just use something statically typed?

(Not saying they're aren't advantages to dynamic types, and I've certainly used them -- just that "Quick and Buggy" isn't one of them.)

Re:I think the world has finally left me behind

[fredrik70]

Goodbye complex threading models.

not entirely true, I'm working with the Ms RTC library for the moment in order to write a WIndow messenger aware app. the lib is actaully a COM lib, wrapped up by c# in an assembly. However, the whole lib is apartment threaded, meaning I got severe problem using it in a multithreaded environment. I can spawn worker threads, but I got to use Invoke in order to send the responses back since the send message method *has* to be executed in the same thread context as the RTC lib. This costs lots of time.
Also, just starting the lib in a separate thread with a run method seems to be fairly impossible sainc eit needs to be run in a thread with a windows message pump, which is fairly hidden in c# world. App is now good enough for a demo, but I got to rewrite the whole thing in c++ with COM in order to make it anywhere close to scaleable. Yes, not actually the fault of c#, but rather the lib, but still, depending on what libs you use in c#, you can still run into the old dodgy threading models.

For Linux?-Warp Drive GUI's

[Anonymous Coward]

"So why do we need this bloat?"

Becuase some of us are doing more with our computers than just staring at them. Besided GPU accelerated GUI's are on their way. What's your rush?

So...

[the_seal]

We could use this to turn Star Wars Eps. I & II into something watchable?

Re:So...

[OmegaBlac]

Sorry, but Mono does not perform miracles.

Re:Mono has come very far in a short period of tim

[callipygian-showsyst]

And don't forget that, unlike Java, C# and .NET are ECMA STANDARDS!

Question about GTK#

[EvanED]

I've been looking high and low for a cross platform GUI tool, and the only one I particularily like is Qt. Which, of course, you have to pay lots of money for to get the Windows version (or deal with the "freeware" bit stuck in the title bars of windows). I'm gonna look into Wx.NET; just found out about that in this discussion.

Anyway, I'm reading over the FAQ for GTK#, and it says you need to have cygwin. So, my question is, does only the developer of the software need to have cygwin, and then it builds it using libraries provided with it and outputs a nice standalone application, or does everyone who wants to use it need to install cygwin? I can't seem to figure this out from the site...

Re:Question about GTK#

[Anonymous Coward]

No, cygwin is not required to run Gtk#, only to build it from source.

Re:Question about GTK#

[DAldredge]

That is only to build the software, you do not need to have Cygwin installed to run GTK# apps.

Re:Question about GTK#

[shantanu_k06]

Get the Windows installer that works out of the box, including Gtk#:
http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.0.1/window s/mono- 1.0.1-gtksharp-1.0-win32-0.5.exe

Re:Question about GTK#

[krumms]

Getting Gtk# running on Windows can be a bitch.

So try this :)

Re:Question about GTK#

[miguel]

Mono 1.0.1 has a new Windows installer that gets
you Gtk# working by default, it is no longer a
separate compilation.

Thanks to Paco and Gonzalo for making this
happen.

Re:Question about GTK#

[marco_craveiro]

for those complaining about gtk on windows, please see my other post

Re:For Linux?

[jcr]

I want Mac OS's interface on Linux!

Request denied.

-jcr

Re:Mono has come very far in a short period of tim

[andreyw]

C# is, but .NET isn't.

Cocoa on top of Mono?

[Xpilot]

I wish they'd update the Objective C bindings for Gnome instead. It'd be nice to use Obj C to create Gnome programs. It's a nice, clean OO language.

Re:Cocoa on top of Mono?

[jcr]

Even better would be finishing up the GNUStep project.

-jcr

Re:Cocoa on top of Mono?

[ArbitraryConstant]

It would be nice to have a consistent multi-platform Objective C library period.

Forget about GUI bindings, all the different implementations don't even share the same root object.

Re:Cocoa on top of Mono?

[jcr]

The number of people still using the original root class, Object, is vanishingly small. GNUStep has a perfectly good implementation of NSObject, which tracks the Apple implementation quite well.

-jcr

Re:Cocoa on top of Mono?

[Archibald Buttle]

I think the big omission in GNUstep though is support for bindings. Last time I checked they didn't have Key Value Coding and Key Value Observation support in their NSObject implementation, which is required for bindings as well as more advanced data models. It would be really nice if they had this, since it would help porting 10.3 apps to Linux.

Re:Cocoa on top of Mono?

[jcr]

I think the big omission in GNUstep though is support for bindings,

We only came out with Bindings in Panther, and that's a lot of code for the GNUSTEP guys to catch up with. KVC/KVO shouldn't be terribly difficult to implement; the hard part was figuring out exactly *what* to implement.

-jcr

Re:Cocoa on top of Mono?

[Archibald Buttle]

You're right of course John, KVC and KVO shouldn't be too hard for the GNUstep folks to implement, especially since how it works is documented.

The thing is though a search for KVO and GNUstep turns up nothing. It doesn't even seem to have been discussed on their mailing lists, and Panther has been around for almost a year now. It doesn't even seem to be on their radar.

For me to port my application to GNUstep I'd need KVO, KVC, KVV, and Bindings (and possibly a tiny bit of CoreGraphics too). Going this way significantly decreased my development time and program complexity, thus increasing its reliability. Porting to GNUstep without these things would basically require a complete re-write. I'm sure they'll get there one day, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Cocoa# intrigues me though. I'm slowly learning C# right now and so far it seems like a very reasonable language. Whilst I am a fan of Obj-C and Cocoa going the C#, Mono, Cocoa#route for my next application might be an interesting idea, since it would greatly assist porting to Linux and Windows.

Ahem, The CLI is just as much of a standard as C#

[ePIsOdEOnline]

Ahem, The CLI is just as much of a standard as C#

http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming /clr/

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[Anonymous Coward]

Cocoa# is 100% native UI faculites, that's its big advantage. wxWidgets is clearly not.

The big advantage of Cocoa# is that if you business logic is separate from your UI then you can easily have a cross platform application.

great

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wonder when Microsoft will try to say, "See? We are the innovators. Look at mono! They followed our .NET framework in a desperate attempt to copy it!"

err, copying IS what they were doing.

While it may be true that Mono was released after .NET, there is ample evidence that open source software is far more innovative than anything Microsoft has put out (with the possible exception of this useless piece of trash.

"...it MAY be true ... after .Net"??? How could it possibly implement .Net even before microsoft could figure it out?

Mono was a lot of hard work but please stick to the facts and don't get religious.

Re:great

[Anonymous Coward]

ur stupid. get a life. u work at microsoft huh? y cant u post under ur real username? afraid of sumthing? thought so. shut the fuck up.

I bid C# welcome

[haxor.dk]

C# may be a Microsoft invention, but now that Mono has opened it for the Linux and Mac people, I bid it welcome. As far as I can see, it is a very powerful language, which offers a number of functions and features of ex. Objective C.

Re:I bid C# welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

C# may be a Microsoft invention No not really, Urm ... you ever heard of Java?

Re:I bid C# welcome

[dasmegabyte]

C# is kind of like Java, but it's also kind of like VB, kind of like C++ and kind of like a dozen other languages. New languages are almost always an assembly of the most popular languages at the time of their development with a slightly different syntax. Personally, I like some of the C# advantages over Java a lot (e.g. modifiers that allow you to expose methods either by namespace/package or by assembly, delegate messaging, true properties, compiler directives and the fact that you aren't forced to declare exceptions). But I am the first to admit they're incremental.

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[after]

That's exactely what I'm doing... kind of. I'm seperating all platform-specific stuff from the pure-wxWidgets specific code in case a port for Linux or Mac arises.

When I say "native" I mean using native platform code to do the UI. Cocoa does this, no questions asked, but not on a non-Mac.

Huh?

[Augusto]

"I just wonder when Microsoft will try to say, "See? We are the innovators. Look at mono! They followed our .NET framework in a desperate attempt to copy it!" "

What in the world are you talking about??? That's exactly what they're trying to do! Duh!!!

Don't worry

[Chuck Chunder]

I'm pretty sure Miguel isn't on whatever planet you're on anyway.

native GUIs with C# on Windows, Linux, OS X

[dekeji]

There is another choice for native GUIs using C# on Windows, Linux, and OS X: wx.NET, bindings of the wxWindows library to Mono and Microsoft's .NET implementation.

wxWindows is great because it gives you a uniform API across different platforms and toolkits, while at the same time using native widgets and giving you access to platform-specific features if you like.

Re:native GUIs with C# on Windows, Linux, OS X

[Lucas Membrane]

How's the performance of wx.Net compared to Windows.Forms? Suppose I want to fill and update a big grid (maybe 10,000 cells); am I going to notice that it happens slower with wx.Net than with Windows.Forms?

Re:native GUIs with C# on Windows, Linux, OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Performance would be very similar.

wx.NET is a .NET layer on top of wxWidgets, which is written in C++. The C++ does all the work. The only time there would be a performance hit is when making alot of unmanaged calls to the C++ side of things.

- Bryan

Patents?-A paradigm divided.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...he controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets. Those are convenient for people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, but are not required for the open source Mono platform, nor integration with today's Mono's rich support of Linux."

So basically those who wish to do cross-platform apps are potentially up a creek without a paddle. No Adobe Photoshop:.NET version for you Linux guys.

Now as for Linux, all Mono basically becomes is another (in a long line of "anothers") toolkit/language to play with.

Re:Patents?-A paradigm divided.

[Ollierose]

I think their intention is to use GTK# as an alternative which works on Linux and Windows as well. I'd guess that this means Photoshop.net for Linux is a possibliity using that toolkit instead

Re:Patents?-A paradigm divided.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'd guess that this means Photoshop.net for Linux is a possibliity using that toolkit instead"

Then that would mean that Adobe would basically have two code bases. One for Windows with transportable bits plus Winisms. While the Linux/Unix port would be transportable code plus GTK#. Now if you could convince Adobe to do transportable + GTK# for a true cross platform app? That would be perfect, but that's assuming once again that the cross platform solution would have everything Adobe would need to get along on both platforms, and thereby reduce or eliminate the temptation to use any winisms.

Re:Patents?-A paradigm divided.

[Ollierose]

That was what I meant - portable stuff + GTK# = app.net on Linux, windows and MacOS X (I've been to mono-project.com again since then)

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[killjoe]

Two words for you. runtime revolution

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[after]

1) I'm a programmer. They don't call it programmer for nothing.
2) My software is going to be distributed in packages that cost over ten thousand dollars (USD), I'm sure "runtime revolution" is not somthing that will sounds good when the clients ask whats behind the software.

Re:Miguel, please leave this planet!

[OmegaBlac]

What is it with the hatred for this man? I swear some you act like he is the anti-christ for what he is attempting to accomplish with the Mono project.

1. No one is forcing anyone to use Mono or run .Net apps on other operating systems.

2. Try to look at the advantages that the OSS and Linux communities can utilize here if we can convince more developers to develop apps for Linux due to the existance of Mono.

3. Mono and Miguel are not going anywhere so all the folks in the anti-mono crowd might as well get use to it.

Re:Ahem, The CLI is just as much of a standard as

[killjoe]

ECMA standards are bullshit. Companies like to submit things to ECMA because it puts the patina of standard on some technology and they still get to charge licencing fees. It's the whole RAND thing.

It's all bullshit business as usual "you must pay us to use your intellectual property" crap.

RMS has left the building.

[Anonymous Coward]

" What is it with the hatred for this man? I swear some you act like he is the anti-christ for what he is attempting to accomplish with the Mono project."

I think it's only fair to point out that I see the same attitude directed at RMS.

"3. Mono and Miguel are not going anywhere so all the folks in the anti-mono crowd might as well get use to it."

Neither is RMS.

Re:Miguel, please leave this planet!

[Anonymous Coward]

"No one is forcing anyone to use Mono or run .Net apps on other operating systems."

and later on

"Mono and Miguel are not going anywhere so all the folks in the anti-mono crowd might as well get use to it. "

So where are we again with 'no one is forced to' ? We are not forced to and later on you write we need to get used to it.. how pathetic.

Also: Mono Project 1.0.1 Released

[DAldredge]

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

Mono 1.0.1 has been released and fixes a number of bugs.

Re:Mono has come very far in a short period of tim

[Skeezix]

The .NET CLI and C# are ECMA standardized.

Slow?

[TheInternet]

"it's S-L-O-W"

Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.

Everything below this sentence is from http://www.alastairs-place.net/cocoa/faq.txt:

* 2.7 How fast are Objective-C messages?

The name "message" might make you think that they are slow; however, they are
actually quite fast. Here are some figures from a 1GHz PowerPC G4 (courtesy
of Marcel Weiher):

Operation | Time (ns)

Increment (memory) variable | 2
Call through an IMP | 12
Local function call | 18
Cross-module function call | 37
Objective-C message | 54
atoi("1") | 182

Local function call refers to a call to a function in the same executable or
dynamic object module. Cross-module function call is a call from one
executable or dynamic object module into another.

On current Apple versions of GCC, an Objective-C message results in a call to
objc_msgSend(), which is itself a cross-module function call. That means that
the actual method dispatch only takes 17ns (on average), which is pretty
quick.

Re:Slow?

[droleary]

Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.

More importantly, no language is faster than a programmer who doesn't know algorithms. Looking at the "S-L-O-W" code through the link provided, it's some of the shittiest toy benchmarking I've ever seen. It compares static strings through an inner method call and nested inside two loops! Even a freshman seeing that code would have had the sense to move the compares outside all that. So in 10 seconds, I was able to take code that was claimed 6x slower than Java and make it 2x faster than Java. Of course, it is still a toy benchmark that accomplishes nothing of value.

Re:Slow?

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, the problem is that you have all these messages which are internal to an app being passed back and forth and each one requires a cross module call which in the Mach-O ABI is very inefficient. In standard compiled code an internal function call is 1 instruction - for crossing DSO boundaries you have to dereference the GOT so it's maybe 2 instructions. It's not much. Crossing into the ObjC runtime on Mach-O is very slow due to the way it wasn't designed for PowerPC, then you have to transition *back* again, and objc_msgSend() isn't exactly a 5 opcode call, so you have all the overhead of this: remember this is taking place for *all* internal method calls.

Basically it stacks up. But that's not the primary disadvantage of Objective-C. The primary disadvantage is that it's not kept pace with the times and nobody knows it. Why would you go for a C variant with wierd syntax that isn't fully garbage collected, when you can go for something very familiar, that is fully garbage collected?

Obj-C went nowhere for the same reason that Lisp and SmallTalk didn't : familiarity was more important to people than theoretical elegance. Next to that the badly designed ABI is peanuts.

Re:Slow?

[callipygian-showsyst]

Basically it stacks up. But that's not the primary disadvantage of Objective-C. The primary disadvantage is that it's not kept pace with the times and nobody knows it. Why would you go for a C variant with wierd syntax that isn't fully garbage collected, when you can go for something very familiar, that is fully garbage collected?

Exactly right! And the more Apple keeps their head in the sand about this, the worse off they'll be! For some reason, Apple's policy is to have their staff "astroturf" sites like /. talking about how awful everything else is. Instead, they should be thinking about being the best platform for C#!

I remember that Microsoft used to be the best platform for Java until Sun foolishly sued them! I think the circumstances are different with C# and if Apple embraced it, Microsoft would have to (publicly) view it as a positive thing! Why else would they get the ECMA standardization of their language and CLI?

Re:Slow?

[dasmegabyte]

I like ObjectiveC. It's two! two! two syntaxes in one!

But I can't wait to use C# under OS X, man...can't wait to do .NET work in Xcode. Java is nice, but it has a noticeable lag in several areas that C# does not suffer from. And delegates, real properties are just awesome.

Re:Slow?

[IamTheRealMike]

Sorry, I was rather imprecise - for ELF PIC code each internal function call is a few instructions once relocation processing has been done. For non-PIC code or jumps between static/hidden symbols it's 1 instruction.

Re:Slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Basically it stacks up. But that's not the primary disadvantage of Objective-C. The primary disadvantage is that it's not kept pace with the times and nobody knows it. Why would you go for a C variant with wierd syntax that isn't fully garbage collected, when you can go for something very familiar, that is fully garbage collected?"

So you can fall back to C when desired, or interface with C++, or whatever else, without having to use an inefficient hack like JNI.

Or if you want to write native applications, which don't rely on a hodgepodge environment of jar files and CLASSPATHs and all that rot.

"Obj-C went nowhere for the same reason that Lisp and SmallTalk didn't : familiarity was more important to people than theoretical elegance. "

If the few hours required to learn Objective-C are too hard for you to manage, you might as well throw in the towel right then, because anything that's actually difficult will have you crying under your desk.

Objective-C is easier to learn than Java, if you know C. The real difficulty - in any language - is learning the frameworks. Square brackets are not a problem for anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature.

The actual reason Objective-C never took off was the multitude of wankers crowning C++ as the end-all-be-all of serious object-oriented development, in the 80's and 90's, even though it sucked ass.

Re:Slow?

[TheInternet]

Well, the problem is that you have all these messages which are internal to an app being passed back and forth and each one requires a cross module call

I'll just have to take your word on this because I don't know the internals quit this far down. I would be curious about how you believe the speed compares to the runtimes for Java and such, though.

Why would you go for a C variant with wierd syntax that isn't fully garbage collected, when you can go for something very familiar, that is fully garbage collected?

I agree that garabage collection is good if done right, but I strongly disagree with the idea of shying away from a programming language because it doesn't look exactly like every other language. And it's not like it's hard to learn. If you know Java or C# or something, you can learn Objective-C in maybe a day.

I mean is it this so unbelievably superior that nothing could match it?

object.oneLongFunctinoNameUpFront(param1, param2, param3)

Or can you consider that there is an adavantage to:

[object doAnActionWithThisObject: param1
usingThis: param2
andThis: param3];

Is it really that scary?

By getting so caught up on familiar, you give up some tremendously useful functionality like Categories, dynamic messaging (-forwardInvocation:), dynamic typing, etc.

- Scott

Re:Slow?

[TheInternet]

And the more Apple keeps their head in the sand about this

Why do you believe they have their "heads in the sand?"

Apple's policy is to have their staff "astroturf" sites like /. talking about how awful everything else is.

How did you come to this conclusion?

Doesn't it seem more likely that those already had experience with and liked Objective-C would go to work at Apple, rather than Apple cooking up some conspiracy to "force" the thing on people? I think they have better things to do.

Instead, they should be thinking about being the best platform for C#!

That sounds fine.

- Scott

Re:Slow?

[callipygian-showsyst]

Basically it stacks up. But that's not the primary disadvantage of Objective-C. The primary disadvantage is that it's not kept pace with the times and nobody knows it.

Actually, many people know it. That's why applications like FinalCut aren't written in it!

However, switching it now won't get Apple closer to its goal of being a consmer products and music publishing company (like Sony!) so it's not a priority for Steve Jobs, as long as he has enough folks in his zealot army who "believe."

Re:Slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Actually, many people know it. That's why applications like FinalCut aren't written in it"

Uh, no, moron, it's not written in Objective-C because Apple acquired it from Macromedia back in 1998, and it was already started in C or C++. Hell, Final Cut shipped before Apple shipped OS X.

There are two very good reasons why Macromedia didn't then use Objective-C for what later became Final Cut. First, OS X wasn't out yet, and confidence in Apple's OS strategy was low, so using Objective-C would be risky from a purely non-technical standpoint.

Second, Macromedia most likely would have wanted a Windows version of the application, which would be difficult if they used Objective-C and Apple's Objective-C frameworks.

When Apple starts a *new* application these days, it tends to use Objective-C, unless a Windows port is needed, in which case Apple uses Carbon, which is available on Windows through the Quicktime port.

Cocoa support for other languages

[foo23]

You can use the native Cocoa interface for more languages than Java, ObjC and now Mono. Good for those who like Ruby for example: http://www.fobj.com/rubycocoa/doc/.

Re:For Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an apple macintosh with system in it's boot rom... That's how small they were able to get it! Call me a romantic geek, but sometimes... I miss monochrome.

Guide for newbies

[irongrip]

And for those of us who are new to Mono, it might help to have a simple 'hello world' example. I've had a quick look with Google but can't find anything. Anyone know of a simple tutorial?

Re:Guide for newbies

[OmegaBlac]

You can look through the ECMA document for a Hello World example. Also check out last months Ars Technica Linux.Ars article on Mono as it provides a couple of examples too.

Re:Guide for newbies

[irongrip]

These don't seem to mention Cocoa. I meant a simple app that displays a Cocoa 'hello world'.

NB: I haven't looked at the PDF yet.

Re:Guide for newbies

[OmegaBlac]

Quick little "Hello World" in C#:

using System;

class Hello
{
static void Main() {
Console.WriteLine("hello world");
}
}

Re:Guide for newbies

[CountBrass]

Wow yes I can see this is so much better than Java! public class Hello { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out,println("hello world"); } } Oh, no it isn't, look at that I did the same thing in Java with one line less of code: and Java and J2EE are already available on Win, OSX, *nix. So C# and .Net are useful why? (Are methods and classes really public by default in C#?)

Re:Guide for newbies

[IainCartwright]

> (Are methods and classes really public by default in C#?)

No.

Re:Guide for newbies

[dasmegabyte]

public class HelloWorld{
public staic void Main(string[] args){
Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
}
}

Or using Windows forms:

using System.Windows.Forms;
public class HelloWorldForm: Form{
private Button btnOk;
HelloWorldForm(){
this.Text = "Hello World."
btnOk = new Button();
btnOk.Text = "&Ok";
btnOk.Click += new EventHandler(btnOk_Click);
}
private void btnOk_Click(object sender, EventArgs e){
this.Close();
}
private static void Main(string[] args){
Application.Run(new HelloWorldForm());
}
}

IM me if you want it explained :)

astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we were laying it down for SCO this week, didn't you get the memo?

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[killjoe]

" 1) I'm a programmer. They don't call it programmer for nothing."

Huh?

"My software is going to be distributed in packages that cost over ten thousand dollars (USD), I'm sure "runtime revolution" is not somthing that will sounds good when the clients ask whats behind the software."

Why would your client care what language it's written in? RR compiles down to native code just like C does. What the fuck is the big deal?

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[after]

I'm also using the Windows driver (usbhid.sys) HID functions. Can this RR shit do that? I don't think so.

What the fuck is _your_ problem? You're trying to change my mind?

"Innovative"

[nikster]

If you are looking for innovative, look at Apple: At the forefront, inventing things for others to copy.

The open source innovation is the open source license and idea itself: It's revolutionary, and it will lead to a better life for all of us. It's pervasive throughout society.

Open source software per se isn't any more or less innovative than any other software.

Statistically speaking, the factors "is open source or not" and "innovative" are independent variables. Eiter can be innovative, both rarely are.

Re:"Innovative"

[dasmegabyte]

The open source innovation is the open source license and idea itself: It's revolutionary, and it will lead to a better life for all of us. It's pervasive throughout society.

The reason Open Source is so powerful is not the license, but the ability of OSS development to attract people who are so fervent about the concept that the see beyond the software implications.

Of course, this is a detriment to its widespread adoption as well. Think about it -- if you tell a guy "OMG you have to check out this new operating system, it's the best, it's so flexible and best of all it's free!" and then proceed to show him Linux, with all its flaws and quirks, he'll be as likely to think you're nuts as to be impressed. Remember: you can't SEE potential, you can only imagine it.

Re:For Linux?

[diamondsw]

I have no experience on the Amiga, so I can't comment there.

Ultimately, if you tighten your code that much something will suffer - either maintainability/expandability, or feature-set. Sure, I can code amazing features into a tiny space using assembly, and be obsolesced very quickly (e.g. WriteNow), or I can scale back my features extensively (e.g. Mac System 5).

Please recall that in the days of the OS cramming into under 1MB of memory, the feature set was very different. On the Mac (using System 6 as a baseline), we had no virtual memory, no aliases, no networking other than Appletalk, no drag and drop, primitive Multifinder, no multiple user support, and by today's standards, really crappy functionality (I have a Mac Plus sitting on my desk).

Also, in those days you'd have 1MB of memory, of which say 300K would be used by the system. That's 30% or so. Today you have 256MB at least, which the system may use 64MB of or so - similar usage. Of course, today's systems have much more advanced memory management than the ones of yesteryear.

Not all progress is "bloat". Remember a variant on the 80/20 rule - people by and large only want 20% of the features in an app, but can never agree on what 20% (not like we ever see arguments about that here on Slashdot, no, never).

answer

[Spy Hunter]

C# and Java provide "reflection" APIs for implementing things like this. It would be quite easy to create a class entirely analagous to NSUndoManager in either language (and without the reference counting cruft necessary because of Objective-C's lack of garbage collection...)

I won't defend C++ here, though. It could be done with function pointers but it wouldn't be pretty.

Re:answer

[BlowChunx]

Maybe part of the point is that Cocoa has many of the useful classes already implemented for you...while elsewhere you have to roll your own.

Re:answer

[bnenning]

C# and Java provide "reflection" APIs for implementing things like this. It would be quite easy to create a class entirely analagous to NSUndoManager in either language

No it wouldn't. Check the documentation; NSUndoManager intercepts *any* message sent to it, and stores it for later invocation on a different target. You can't do that with reflection, which only allows you to call one of a fixed number of methods.

Another example: there are third party libraries that add higher order messaging to Cocoa collection classes. They allow you to write code like "[[array select] isFroody]", which will return all objects in array for which the method -isFroody returns true. Again, the initial "isFroody" message is intercepted, then forwarded to each object in the array.

Re:answer

[Anonymous Coward]

No it wouldn't. Check the documentation; NSUndoManager intercepts *any* message sent to it, and stores it for later invocation on a different target. You can't do that with reflection, which only allows you to call one of a fixed number of methods. // "Intercepts" the message
public void sendMessage(String methodName, Object[] args);

If that's not good enough, then you must be appealing to the old "dynamic typing r00lz" argument.

Re:answer

[jcr]

I agree, High-order messaging is another great example of the power of the Objective-C runtime.

-jcr

Re:answer

[Spy Hunter]

I did check the documentation. I don't see any "compelling advantage" in NSUndoManager. In C# you can't do this:

undoManager.SetTarget(target).method(arg1, arg2, ...);

but you can do this:

undoManager.RegisterUndo(target, "method", arg1, arg2, ...);

which works in exactly the same way as far as managing undos. Maybe "completely analogous" is a bit strong to describe this implementation, but it has all the same functionality and is just as elegant as far as I'm concerned. That array thing could also be done with reflection in the same way:

array.select("isFroody");

Trivial.

Re:For Linux?

[richardfish]

Yeah, the Amiga was fast, but rememeber that one lame app would crash the entire system. The Guru was not very helpful in debugging memory pointer corruption either... I prefer the stability of Linux, OS X, and even XP, thanks.

Linux on CLR

[marksibly]

Personally, I find this whole 'Linux on CLR' thing very disturbing. What would happen, and, more importantly, how much leverage would MS suddenly have over Linux, if it all actually took off in a big way? And its not like its anything particularly clever. Sure, C# is a nice enough language, but the real deal here is the platform/language neutral CLR - which has been done academically several times over. Perhaps its like the KDE/GNOME thing. Perhaps the whole Linux scene has just been waiting for someone to 'spank' them into accepting a standard? Pretty ironic if it turned out to be MS though. Dunno. Just very cynical about what the real importance of what's happening here.

GTK# is NOT ready

[ralinx]

i'm developing a C# application which has a System.Windows.Forms (SWF) frontend for the Windows version, and a GTK# frontend for the Linux version. I was hoping to get rid of the SWF frontend and deploy my application on Windows and Linux using the GTK# frontend. Despite all of the hype surrounding Mono/GTK# (thanks miguel) i have not been able to get this working because GTK# simply doesn't work correctly with MS.NET. There are parts of GTK# that actually rely on an incompatibilty between Mono and MS.NET to work correctly. So when this code is executed with MS.NET, you'll get runtime exceptions. The same code will function correctly on Windows when you use Mono on Windows, but then i get memory leaks everytime i use Regex.Match which my application needs quite often. So after leaking about 395MB of RAM, the garbage collector will crash with an error ("too many heap sections"). The same code runs perfectly on Linux in Mono.

I would really like to see Mono and GTK# completely ready to be used on Windows for _serious_ stuff (as in: not the average Hello World GTK# app) but rigth now, it just isn't up to the task yet. On Linux, it's pretty good alraedy, but on Windows it's just unusable for my application. I've had to go back to using my old SWF frontend for my windows users.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[ralinx]

I mainly use Linux... Miguel and Ximian make it sound as if Mono is _serious_ so i gave it a shot. When i'm on Windows (thanks to VMWare), i use Visual Studio because the IDE is incredibly good, and because Mono on Windows is barely usable IMO, on Linux however, it's pretty good.

and umm, as i mentioned earlier in my first post: you can't even use what Microsoft provides if you intend to do anything serious with GTK#. Since the topic is also about GTK# taking on Windows.Forms, i figured it would be worth mentioning the problems i experienced with it.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with MONO is that it's implementing and simulating the features that Microsoft provides. The MONO team can't simply copy the API 1:1 or have the functions copied 1:1 they MUST work around everything to not violate any licenses and patents. That's also what Miguel often has said himself. The point of MONO is to be in competition with Microsofts own technology by going a different path but offering similar stuff but not compatible throughly due to these 'work arounds'. MONO will never be able to work flawlessly with Microsoft .NET technology because this requires to have an 1:1 API. This also explains all the issues you mentioned. The only thing de Icaza wants to try here is making MONO better than what Microsoft offers so everyone uses his technology and so his technology will lead the market one day. A vision and a dream for sure.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[Anonymous Coward]

This does NOT, IMHO, explain the issues mentioned above, which are clearly 'bugs' in the 1.0 release of Mono. Mono should be 100% compatible with at least the core of the .NET framework. Anything less would suck big time!

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottom line: If ya wanna rule, stick with Microsoft

BILL RULES!!!

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[kahei]

Thanks for the report. This is exactly what I would like to do -- create cross-platform GUI apps that work in Mono on linux and Mono/MS.NET on win, and I was hoping I could use GTK# as the GUI layer in both cases... but I guess not :(

Still, I think Mono is the Best Hope (tm) for a unified application platform that I can use for everything.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[miguel]

Did you bother filing a bug report in
bugzilla.ximian.com?

Filing bug reports on Slashdot (without the
information needed, mind you) wont get them
fixed.

Filing them on Bugzilla will.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[ralinx]

as a matter of fact i did.

i filed a bug for the gtk# errors: http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=61348
Mike Kestner responded to this, his comments don't mention if it's actually been fixed yet though

and as for the memory leak with regular expressions on windows: http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=62293
nobody has even bothered to respond though.

Filing bug reports on Slashdot (without the
information needed, mind you) wont get them
fixed.

Filing them on Bugzilla will.
i used to think the same... i had to get ignored on Bugzilla to even want to post on Slashdot.

Just don't claim Mono is ready for something when it clearly isn't.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[Nurgled]

It sounds to me like your current approach is how it should be done. Make sure none of your other code depends on the UI and then just write several UI layers. That way it'll look native wherever you run it.

In my opinion, GTk# on Windows should just be used to run software that was never intended to run on Windows, as a compatibility layer in similar ven to Cygwin. If you are actually indending your application to be cross-platform, having several switchable GUI layers is the way to go. Later on, if it seems worthwhile, you can put a Cocoa# GUI layer on it too and you have a Mac version with no change to the guts of your application. You could even make a terminal-based user interface to parts of your core application as appropriate without changing the "interesting" parts at all. If your app is open source, other people might even contribute alternative interfaces for you!

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[ralinx]

you're right about all those things... but it gets tedious to implement the same logic (eventhough it's just presentation logic) more than once. I don't like UI code, to me it's the most boring part of application development. It would be very nice if i'd only have to write that code once and have it work on both Windows and Linux. Now i have to do this boring work twice, once in SWF, and once in GTK#

i can definitely understand that Mono/GTK# isn't ready for that yet... i know they could definitely use more developers, and that's not always easy for an open source project. But what bothers me is that the Mono developers are always claiming that Mono/GTK# is the answer to the cross platform problem and that it's ready for it when pretty basic GTK# code doesn't even run on on Windows without crashing.

Instead of doing so many interviews and posting on Slashdot, perhaps they should actually try to fix those things and make their software do what they claim it does.

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[miguelanxo]

As for getting things fixed via bugzilla reports, I only can say they fixed all the bugs I submitted quite promptly, and they were unrelated things, like Https.WebRequest not working with https uris (fixed) or gtk# glitches (fixing)

Re:GTK# is NOT ready

[Nurgled]

The solution to the cross-platform problem won't be a bunch of class wrappers around native widgets. Instead, that problem will be solved with higher-level conceptual classes which don't have a one-to-one relationship with the underlying widgets. It would be another layer between the business logic and the UI code which takes the high-level interface ideas and makes the right calls to make it happen in a sensible way for each system.

Of course, making a completely general concept-based class library isn't easy. However, I'm sure someone could achieve a compromise which manages to encapsulate many of the common ideas present in today's GUIs. For example, rather than having a Window class which can contain Controls, you could (for suitable classes of application) have a DocumentCollection class which can contain Documents. On Windows this could be rendered as an MDI interface with a child for each document (I know MDI is deprecated, but this is just an example) while on MacOS this would presumably just be a bunch of top-level windows which "stick together" in the window order. This is a pretty poor example, but I'm sure you can think of some of your own -- the higher-level they are the better.

For the purposes of your application, though, you could make your own abstractions which are totally specific to whatever you're writing. The only bit that has to differ between platforms is a a small set of API calls in response to methods from the higher-level API above. Most of the "presentation logic" which actually makes the interface do something would be in the high-level interface layer shared between them all.

I do admit, though, that designing a high-level GUI abstraction layer for many programs would be tedious and unrewarding. For larger projects, though, it'd be a useful approach. I have a small attachment to the methods I've outlined here because my degree dissertation project was in part based around these ideas, although not applied exactly as I'm describing here. I won't claim it's the best approach for everything, though; toolkits like SWT for Java or wxWidgets which abstract at the widget/component level can be very useful in many cases.

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[p3l]

What the fuck is _your_ problem? You're trying to change my mind?

Now there's a frightful concept.

Re:Mono has come very far in a short period of tim

[Anonymous Coward]

But MONO is not Microsoft standard due to work arounds in it's implementations.

oops

[KAMiKAZOW]

"Ximian does not seem really interested in real platform CocoaSharp."

should be: "Ximian does not seem really interested in real platform independence."

Sorry, I messed with the clipboard. ;)

Re:Miguel, please leave this planet!

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear some you act like he is the anti-christ for what he is attempting to accomplish with the Mono project.

They are KDE zealots. They post offensive slaggings of anyone who doesn't agree with them that KDE should rule the world. I'm surprised you are puzzled about this... the KDE loons are really quite famous for their awful behaviour.

Miguel started GNOME. See also, Sun, RedHat, UserLinux -- all been subjected to this abuse.

Please shut up

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than vi/emacs crap, nobody has any real beef with RMS's technical direction (which is pure phone company c/unix). Miguel, otoh, gets tarred with the worst sort of FUD, whether it was for Gnome or Mono.

Re:Miguel, please leave this planet!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was RMS who started GNOME and not de Icaza. Icaza was the first who collected a shitload of tools and hacked some GTK junk around them which the then named GNOME.

Re:Ahem, The CLI is just as much of a standard as

[Anonymous Coward]

killjoe == troll

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also using the Windows driver (usbhid.sys) HID functions. Can this RR shit do that? I don't think so.

Slippery asshole, aren't ya. He completely demolishes your first objection, so you just ignore it and come up with some other bullshit. The fact that your new bullshit is incompatible with your original post doesn't even occur to you, because you're too desperate to try to manufacture a way to not look stupid.

Question...

[johannesg]

You appear to be reading slashdot, and yet be a productive individual. How?

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[after]

You have a better alternative to accessing USB HID drivers? I'm really open to using somthing else because I'm not too fond of the current API set myself.

Tuna

[!the!bad!fish!]

Just like I buy dolphin safe Tuna ...

What's so ethical about eating an endangered species?
I'm fairly certain that Mono and .Net are also dolphin friendly, but you eat what you choose.

Re:Tuna

[Anonymous Coward]

If Rattlesnakes or fireants were an endangered species, I'd still see it as ethical to get rid of them.

Tuna is evil.

Re:Tuna

[killjoe]

Your link is dead. I presume it was talking about bluefin tuna which is not what you get in the cans.

Re:Ahem, The CLI is just as much of a standard as

[Anonymous Coward]

C# is an ISO standard too.

ISO/IEC 23270:2003
Information technology -- C# Language Specification

why does everyone say Java isn't cross-platform?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Java developer. Have been for 5 years or so. In all that time I've been developing on a windows desktop machine and deploying to a variety of servers - windows, linux and solaris. I've NEVER had any problems with incompatibilities between platforms. And I'm talking all kinds of apps - from desktop stuff (in the much-maligned and thoroughly underated and misunderstood Swing) to weblogic-based enterprise systems. What's going on? Am I some kind of Java god and just don't realise it? It's really not that hard to write Java code that really can run anywhere without any changes. In fact I think I'd have to try pretty hard to think of a way to create cross-platform incompatibilities (apart from obvious schoolboy errors like hard-coding paths). It saddens me to see the Slashdot crowd constantly claiming otherwise. Is this really people's experience or is everyone just repeating the mantra they've heard everyone else saying? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Java's too slow for real applications...

Re:For Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be concentrating on making quick & efficient UIs like the Amiga had, or the early Macs, not bloat upon bloat upon bloat.

Are you kidding? I never used an Amiga, but the early Mac GUI was a case of "move the window, watch it redraw line by line".

Re:Mono has come very far in a short period of tim

[alext]

The point was that most of Dotnet isn't standardized (~10% of classes and declining), but there is a group of /. posters who continue to insert this claim into all Mono threads although they know better.

Of course, that probably has something to do with the relative value of a Dotnet compatible system (high) vs. a Dotnet-wannabee (low).

IDEs for the uninformed

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reasons I won't be using GTK# though, are the fact that they still say they are unstable and there's no documented way to build apps graphically (SharpDevelop is Windows only, Eclipse is too slow) If you know how to do it in VS.NET or Whidbey, please get some links done.

Rotoshop

[Udo Schmitz]

Innovative? I wonder if Robert Sabiston has any patents on his software: http://www.lariat.org/AtTheMovies/wakinglife.html

Re:Mono has come very far in a short period of tim

[pohl]

The point was that most of Dotnet isn't standardized (~10% of classes and declining), but there is a group of /. posters who continue to insert this claim into all Mono threads although they know better.

Astroturfers, all of them.

Petty Naming Gripe

[DLWormwood]

Cocoa#? GTK#?

Wasn't the "gag" for MS naming the .NET language "C#" to refer to the musical note? Since C# doesn't appear to have a "#" operator, why not use musical names or some other rule for naming these other languages? Just tacking "#" after language names shows a lack of imagination and gives MS too much of a marketing leverage over the open source project's future PR. Not to mention confusing all those shell scripters out there? (-;

Re:Petty Naming Gripe

[borgheron]

That's because they're not new languages. Just extensions of the C# set of frameworks to encompass new APIs.

So it's still C#. :)

GJC

and sure enough

[Anonymous Coward]

he gets modded up

SWT/Java wipes the ass with GTK#

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, has anyone seen Gimp on Windows? It looks pathetic, all the system dialogs are gone replaced with some horrible GTK dialogs.

At least SWT (like wxWindows) uses "real" native widgets on all platforms (GTK on Linux, Cocoa on Mac, MFC on Windows), instead of emulating them. That's the way to go.

Who cares about the OSS or "Linux" community??

[orasio]

My reasons for using GNU and other free software are political, not just technical.

(I don't either have the money to buy proprietary software right now, but that could be arranged, I have an employer)

I don't care as much about technical stuff as I care about politics. If I felt that the Mono project was a threat to freedom, I would be against it. That's the reasoning behind all the mono bashing.
Anyway, I don't care much about Mono because I enjoy Java & GCJ, but my point is that it's useless to refute political statements with technical reasons. There is some proprietary software that is technically better (.... matlab?, Intel compilers?) but freedom is too much to pay for better performance.

Re:Miguel, please leave this planet!

[omicronish]

I wonder about the hatred too. I code heavily on Microsoft platforms, and looking at the documentation for the new Longhorn APIs, I am quite sure Mono will become even more important when Longhorn rolls out. Why? Just look at the docs; all the new APIs are managed .NET APIs.

I commend Miguel for his awesome work, and the rest of the people behind Mono. When Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows, which is undeniably the most used desktop OS in the world, and heavily uses .NET, you simply don't ignore the thing.

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[killjoe]

" I'm also using the Windows driver (usbhid.sys) HID functions. "

Gee I don't know I am not in the .001% of the programmers that need that. Hey wait a minute! You said you were writing a cross platform application!. So were you lying then or are you lying now?

"What the fuck is _your_ problem? You're trying to change my mind?"

Nah. Just pointing out that you are an idiot.

Screw Windows and .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Write all your business apps on Linux and make everyone use them through vnc or some other remote desktop program if they really need Windows. Else just ditch the PC altogether and give 'em a thin client..

SWT

[Anonymous Coward]

Try swt

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

Re:For Linux?

[dave420]

Because we want to do more with our computers than play rudimentary games and run very basic apps, or even have a nice looking GUI. GUI speed != GUI looks.

With your "2 or 3GHz" comment, you've obviously never seen a hardware-accelerated GUI working on some normal hardware. Linux user, perchance?

Windows.Forms in Mono-MS Virus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I want to thank squiggleslash for articulating (in an acceptable manner) what's fundamentally wrong with F/OSS today. You're speaking of Mono, but it extends to other things as well. For example the unquestioned acceptance of binary drivers. The denigration of those who put principle over pleasure. The inability to see and understand the core paradigms that make Unix/Linux what they are. Basically we're being infected by the MS mentality, even if the code is safe from our eyes.

I think you want to be using Smalltalk

[Anonymous Coward]

Intercepting message sends and messages-as-data are commonplace in Smalltalk. The syntax of HOM is kind of neat, granted.

P.S. in Smalltalk you'd say 'array select: [:each | each isFroody]'

Notice how you don't have to play tricks with method dispatching? That's because I'm using a block to inject current context into another context (that created by sending #select:), which , IMHO, is much, much nicer than forwarding messages.

see http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/, http://www.squeak.org/, or http://www.ambrai.com/ (for a Mac specific dialect, unfortunately based on Carbon)

Proof is in the pudding

[Anonymous Coward]

But can't find much pudding. A google search for mono Linux applications returns loads of hits on mono the project, but nothing I can download and take for a spin. Mono seems to be primarily about mono at the moment.

If some great apps are created with mono, then it will take off, regardless of people's reservations about patents, the moral dimension, etc., etc. If it's demonstrably great, people will use it.

Leaky Abstractions.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I believe others will follow with compilers/interpreters for (managed)C++, Obj C, Ruby, Python, Java, etc. "

How well will that work from the "leaky abstractions" perspective?

Miguel, please keep up the good work!

[beanlover]

I work for a company that writes it's product in a language called Databus...it used to be hardware specific but now it is a complied yet interpreted language that runs on a LOT of platforms...that is it's strength and pretty much the reason why we don't use "more modern" languages.

I have been watching the Mono project ever since I have heard of it and I am truly amazed at all they have accomplished. I know they have a long way to go...but YOU GUYS RAWK!

I can only hope that one day Mono will allow for our apps to be as portable as they are now so we can switch to another language that has more robust OO abilities not to mention other things I hate about db/c.

So, please, keep up the good work on Mono...many folks out here are rooting for you.

B

Re:wxWidgets, another _perfect_ alternative with M

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a better alternative to accessing USB HID drivers?

It has nothing to do with your original post. You said you couldn't use it because of the image. But you were complaining just to complain, apparently.

Not quite

[TheInternet]

If that's not good enough, then you must be appealing to the old "dynamic typing r00lz" argument

I don't think you've addressed the point.

If you send a message to an Objective-C object and it doesn't have a method that matches the message name, the object can redirect (or do whatever it wants -- log it, for example) the message from within -forwardInvocation.

- Scott

Re:Who cares about the OSS or "Linux" community??

[True Grit]

Anyway, I don't care much about Mono because I enjoy Java & GCJ, but my point is that it's useless to refute political statements with technical reasons

Funny, I don't use Java for political reasons either. IMO, they both have problems right now. Mono is under the gun until MS comes out in writing that it won't pursue patent litigation or license terms that would kill Free Software (the later will *never* happen), while Sun won't loosen up its control of Java enough for it to even be distributed with Debian, since it fails to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). So, if the politics are important to you, you should be using wxWidgets, or ".GNU", or whatever.

Compromise?

[BorgCopyeditor]

from my observations "compromise" is a word missing from the vocabulary of many free software people

Whenever a high school friend of mine would pass a "YIELD" sign on the road, he would retort defiantly, "Never!"

Re:Who cares about the OSS or "Linux" community??

[orasio]

Or Java and GCJ, from the GNU Compiler Collection.