Mono Progress In the Past Year

Eugenia writes "OSNews posted an article accounting the applications created in GTK# the past 8 months, since the release of Mono 1.0. While many of them are still in their infancy, it's clear that the platform had a healthy progress, with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other, less known gems, like SportsTracker, PolarViewer, MooTag, GFax, GIB, Sonance and Bluefunk. The 2.0 version of Mono is expected around May, but the developers advised distros and users to upgrade to Mono 1.1.4 despite being a beta."

Comments

Mono is Wonderful

[nberardi]

Mono is a wonderful piece of reverse engineering, many of these apps I didn't even realize were Mono apps and I have been using them for a while now. In addition I found a couple that I am going to start using such as portage-sharp.

Keep up the good work Mono team, I love C#, and I love how you are brining it to *nix.

I fear the day when Microsoft will come and snatch this out from under the Mono team, but I really think this benifits Microsoft just as having an open source version of Java benifits Sun.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[FidelCatsro]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/22/13 10232&tid=109&tid=155
This is the reason(meaning many simmilar things M$ have done) I currently dont use mono for any production systems ,
now this isnt totaly related , i do admit but the relationship is too close for comfort
. i feel on unsteady ground using it , not that it would matter as im in the EU (unless those *Explitives* get their way) ,Though i would hate to think any project i was working on could have the rug pulled so firmly out from underneath it and stop some of my freinds in america being unable to use said project legaly on a linux system .
Although i must also raise a glass to the mono team on an excelent job.

Mono talk w/ icaza

[camcorder]

Miguel de Icaza interview about mono on lug radio. Really nice one.

Wrong punctuation?

[Speare]

with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other, less known gems,

I haven't heard of even one of these "super hits." I think that should have been punctuated,

with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other less-known gems,

C# Rocks - go mono go.

[Tanaka]

I'm just getting into C#, and I love it. One interesting thing I found was that if I ran a socket server app on Windows, I couldn't connect more than 64 clients in a single thread. I tried the same binary on Linux/Mono, and it bombed out at 1011 connections.

Keep up the good work - I'm loving it!

Dashboard

[Xpilot]

I'm really looking forward to Dashboard (not mentioned in the article), the desktop app that uses Beagle to gives relevant information that it's collected on your computer about your current activity. It sounds really cool, and Open Source hackers came up with this before Microsoft did.

C# is Better than Java(At least I think So)

[Laoping]

Ok, Microsoft Is evil, this I will give you, but C# rocks. After years in C and C++, I moved to Java, and It was good, then about 2 years ago I moved to C# and it was better. Now I program in both, for work and graduate school. I have to say they are very similar, but when I am doing a program in Java, I always miss a few of the C# features (virtual keyword for functions, Get/Set are better in C#, etc)

The only problem I have with C# was that it was not as portable as Java, but Mono came to my rescue. I was surprised how many of my program just worked in Mono (after removing winforms that is). I can't wait for version 2.0.

Really, Mono should be embraced /.ers . If we can start making programs for the general population that run on *nix systems, but look just like they do on windows, more people will use *nix. What we have to realize is that most people in the world(not on this website J) don't have 4 computers in their basement running different operations systems, they just have the one running windows.

P.S. And for some reason, they still have the sides on their computer case.......

Re:C# is Better than Java(At least I think So)

[Stephen Williams]

Get/Set are better in C#

I see loads of love for the C# property syntax, but I personally find it a bit irritating because you can't have different access qualifiers on the getter and setter. If you want, say, a public getter and a protected setter, you have to write a special setter method that defeats the purpose of having the special property syntax.

If the property syntax were modified to look like this, it'd be perfect:

string Foo
{
public get { return foo; }
protected set { foo = value; }
}

-Stephen

Re:Beagle

[Glock27]

Too bad Java is a dog, especially for smallish desktop apps.

You should try gcj with the SWT or gnome-java bindings. Nothing doggy about it. :-)

BTW, gcj is the gcc Java compiler.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[beanlover]

Thank you for your post. I was one of those that believed because it was an ECMA standard that it was free and open.

I went to the ecma site and saw this page:

WARNINGS

The liability and responsibility for the implementation of an Ecma Standard rests with the implementor, and not with Ecma.

Below that was a warning and a linke about settling patent issues pertaining to ECMA standards. Scary.

B

C# for UI?

[swimmar132]

I'm primarily a *nix developer, but this Mono implementation of .NET seems somewhat interesting. It may be a good way to go in the future for Linux GUI applications (as C# is probably better suited for GUI development than C++ or others -- and don't mention Java please).

A good portable way to write programs might be to write the application core in standard C++, then write the UI in C#/Mono on *nix, Obj-C on OS X, and C#/.NET on Windows.

Thoughts?

Re:Mono has a long way to go, even in OSS

[Sunspire]

It's all a matter of how you choose your metrics. Here's another one, desktop applications that don't suck horribly:

Java: Azureus, Eclipse.... I'm sure if I really searched I could find a third.
Mono: Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot, Muine, MonoDevelop etc.

It's no sillier a metric than the amount of showelware on SourceForge for a given platform. For the Linux user it's certainly a more interesting one.

Even these so called crown jewels of the Java desktop can be spotted a mile away as Java programs. When you run Beagle or Tomboy you can not distinguish them from native GTK+ apps. For all intents and purposes they are native.

Java and Mono have chosen completely different paths at this point. It's futile to try to evangelize one language over the other at this point. Java has settled as a backend language for stuff like web services, while Mono/.NET competes with the incumbent C/C++, and Python to some extent, over the desktop. It's now a case of different tools for different jobs, and at this time it's already pretty clear that Mono is going to be a major force when it comes to the future of the Linux desktop.

Re:Did you forget about wxNET?

[Coryoth]

Each platform has different HIGs which determine how an application should behave as well as how it should look. Using the same UI code on multiple platforms results in apps that don't match the HIGs on any platform except (if you're lucky) the one on which they were developed.

Which raises the interesting question of whether we should be looking for another level of abstraction for GUIs beyond widget toolkits that let you write one codebase that then applies the HIG rules of the platform (which, of course, have to be something formally codified rather than just a spec document) to generate a (relatively speaking) HIG compliant UI.

Imagine having applications written on a level such that the "OK/Cancel" button order is determined by the platform rather than by where the code explicitly placed the buttons. Such would certainly make GNOME and KDE much more compatible. At the same time it would formalise the HIG from a "reccomended way of doing things" into a mandated consistent GUI.

Jedidiah.