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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."
.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.
Absolutely nothing, but you're not the target demographic.
.NET is the hot new buzzword, and your VPs aren't smart enough to realize that it's not suitable for embedded realtime applications.
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.
Think about it this way.
.NET/C#
.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.
.NET is cool. Linux is cool. Mono is cool.
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
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,
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
Lets marry them together and reap the benefits.
Standing at the back of room pouting isn't helping advance your cause.
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.
.Net apps on other operating systems.
1. No one is forcing anyone to use Mono or run
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.
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).
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).
.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.
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.