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.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[m50d]

It does benefit them. Hopefully when Sun sees all the devs switching it will finally open up Java. If not, good riddance - C# includes all the good bits anyway.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[shird]

Is it really reverse engineering? I mean the full spec for the CLR and various other things with .NET have been published for the very reason to create VMs such as Mono on different platforms.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[TheRealMindChild]

I dont see the benefit AT ALL. What happens when all of these JVMs start having different quirks? You then have to write your Java applications toward specific JVM (Wow... just like what everyone bitched at Microsoft for). Then what is the point?

Java isnt closed in the sense that no one can get the code. Im not sure of the money you need (if any), but every JVM is well tested to make sure it does things in the way that Sun intended them to. That's what MAKES it a usable platform... and Im sure Sun really wouldnt like to support there multitudes of customers who are trying to run a java applications that seems to only work on the L33t-h4x0r-optimized JVM.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[FooBarWidget]

That's what certification and unit testing program are for. You only get the label "100% compatible JVM implementation" if you pass the test. Where's the problem?

Even if Sun doesn't open their implementation, people will still create Java compilers. Take a look at the Kaffe and GCJ project. Why don't you complain about them "fragmentating" the Java community? If Sun open sources their JVM implementation, how will it suddenly generate more fragmentation than GCJ/Kaffe already do?

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[labratuk]

You and anyone who says "it's open enough" don't know what you're talking about. Without the freedom to fork, you don't have any freedoms at all.

Without that freedom, you and all that code you & your team spent 18 months coding are sitting under the thumb of Sun. Sun can tell you which platforms you can migrate to in the future (unless of course you want to rewrite everything in something non-java). If it is against Sun's business interest to port / allow a port of java to architecture/os xyz, you're not going to be using it.

It may not even be the fault of Sun being aggressive. What if Sun drops java? What if Sun goes bust? What if Sun has a hostile takeover by a company who wants to sweep java under the rug? One way or another there could be no more java releases.

So in 5 - 10 years time when the industry makes another architecture/os leap, you're stuck running on platforms which were around in 2005, no matter how much cheaper & faster the more common new systems are. Time to rewrite plenty of code.

It's not hard to imagine - people are making the jump to amd64 now. A couple of years from now, amd64 will be the commodity hardware standard. Cheap and easily available. Imagine if Sun had for one reason or another dropped java in 2003 with no amd64 port.

No amd64 java. We'll have to stay running our systems in deprecated 32bit mode. Or rewrite everything. Or use one of the unofficial java replacements that's come up to fill the cracks. But oh no, those would be forks that comply to no standard!

And really, please drop the myth of open source incompatible fragmentation.

Python's been going for around 15 years. How many python standards are there to code to?

Perl's been going for longer. How many perl forks are there?

How may rubies?

How many phps are there?

Now let's look at some closed languages:

All I can think of is your beloved java. MS, IBM, Sun, Kaffe, GCJ... Your strategy of keeping it closed to prevent incompatible versions doesn't seem to have worked!

If you want all of your code to be under your own control, don't write it in java.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[msh104]

well, only the core is openened.
winforms, winfx(avalon, winfs, etc) and the like are still closed and a potential attack areas from the microsoft front. and these probably going to be much used in apps.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[aled]

# Python's been going for around 15 years. How many python standards are there to code to?
# Perl's been going for longer. How many perl forks are there?
# How may rubies?
# How many phps are there?

How many big industry names (Sun, MS, IBM, Oracle, etc) are wrestling around those like in Java? No one. There is no danger because there are no pressures to do so.

All I can think of is your beloved java. MS, IBM, Sun, Kaffe, GCJ... Your strategy of keeping it closed to prevent incompatible versions doesn't seem to have worked!

MS DID forked Java with its propietary extensions. Which it was ruled by a court it couldn't under their licence agreement with Sun. When MS decided it could not embrace and extend Java at pleasure started .Net which is very similar.
IBM AFAIK made its JVMs based on Sun's.
From Kaffe homepage: "Kaffe is not the best Java virtual machine for developing Java applications, as it lacks much in the way of documentation, compatibility, debugging/profiling support, etc. If you are learning Java, or are looking for a complete Java development environment, you will probably be best served by using a "real" Java development environment (such as the JDK) licensed from Sun."
GCJ: "GCJ is a portable, optimizing, ahead-of-time compiler for the Java Programming Language.". There many other Java compilers around, notably the Eclipse project has one and Jikes, both open source.

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget Sun.

Their source code is, by all I can see from feedback in the Mustang (next version of Java) forum on java.net, an unbuildable, unmaintanable mess, just like proprietary software usually is. Sun's code is increasingly irrelevant, and opening it up would probably only end up with some poor people wasting their time trying to breath life into the baroque bitrotting corpus and getting frustrated with Sun's bizarre control urge in their licensing division.

If there is any future for Java, the platform, it lies within GNU Classpath and its family of runtimes. Sun had total control of the platform and blew it. Now it's up to us to fix it, and on many accounts, the free implementation are much better than the non-free ones. So noone in the free runtime community really cares about Sun or Sun's source code any more. People are increasingly busy taking the future of Java in their hands.

What's really funny is that people hacking on free software runtimes like Kaffe or Gcj want to be compatible with Sun's implementation, but Sun doesn't really want us to, because people would switch in droves. So they make it nearly impossible get the compliance test suites, the API specs are in many parts a complete joke, and the language and VM specs haven't ever been updated to match reality since Java 1.1. They do flail their arms around a lot, and there is a lot of chest-thumping on Sun's side about how open they are, but in reality, there is very, very little coming out of Sun that's really useful for a free software implementation of Java.

They've done some great work making themselves irrelevant and to turn a nice platform into a legacy platform. Oh, and before I forget, ... go mono!

cheers,
dalibor topic,
Kaffe dev

Re:Mono is Wonderful

[TheRealMindChild]

Sour Grapes huh?

Because you are incapable of catching up with Sun, pissed off you can't use their code in yours, and that you can't even come close to meeting requirements with your project, so Sun's Java MUST suck! And the only way it can be good is if it is open sourced and you can rip off of it!.... Right.

Mono talk w/ icaza

[camcorder]

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

huh?

[utexaspunk]

Tomboy, F-spot, Muine & Blam! ... MooTag, GFax, GIB, Sonance and Bluefunk

WTF? Who comes up with names like these? I would blame the MBA's, but this is open source stuff, right?

Re:huh?

[SoCalChris]

Seriously...

At least give the program a somewhat descriptive name, ie Office, Internet Explorer, TurboTax, NotePad, Photoshop, etc...

If I were looking for a music player on Google, I wouldn't even give search results about programs named Muine, MooTag or Bluefunk a second glance, simply because they don't sound like music players.

Open Source programmers are good at a lot of things, but naming their programs isn't one of them. Just look at the whole Phoenix/Firebird/FireFox fiasco.

Re:huh?

[John Fulmer]

At least give the program a somewhat descriptive name, ie Office, Internet Explorer, TurboTax, NotePad, Photoshop, etc...

Yeah, and forget Access, Visio, Excel, BOB, Acrobat, Encore, PowerPoint, and similarly named programs. I can't tell what they do either just by their names....

Re:huh?

[Coryoth]

At least give the program a somewhat descriptive name

You mean like Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Visio, Access, Oracle, or Winamp?

As we all know a product can only become successful if it has a clearly descriptive name like those above. I know whenever I want password and authentication software I think of access, when I want a scientific data visualization library I think of Visio, and it is clear that Winamp is software to provide fine tuning for your desktop volume controls.

Oddly however; stupidly named programs like Firefox (what on earth does that do?) seem to be doing okay.

Have you ever taken part in a GIMP renaming brainstorm session?

Paint (taken)
Photoshop (taken)
Photopaint (taken)
Paintshop (taken)
ImagePaint (taken)
Imageshop (taken)
Photostudio (taken)
PaintStudio (taken)
Studiopaint (taken)
Imagestudio (taken)
PhotoImage (taken)
ImagePhoto (taken)
.
.
.

I'm not saying GIMP is the best name, but when you demand an obvious name that associates with the field you suddenly find lots of other people who were thinking the same thing.

Jedidiah.

Re:huh?

[bonch]

It's more than that. Those names just sound better and friendlier, and are easy to remember.

I don't know why, but just about every OSS project title is some tongue-in-cheek in-joke amongst the developers who are the only ones who think it's funny. Like KDE programs all being titled with puns starting with "K."

Besides, Powerpoint, Access, and Visio have reasonable similarity with what they actually do. As for your completely random and pointless reference to Bob, I'm still amazed Slashdotters obsess over this small desktop shell released for a short time way back in 1994.

Re:huh?

[bonch]

Powerpoint, as in making powerful points. Most presentations are made up of bullet points.

Visio, as in vision, as in visualizing schematics.

This isn't difficult.

Everybody knows

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, everyone knows Tomboy, F-spot, Beagle, MonoDevelop, Muine, Blam! or Monodoc

Uh, right, I knew that. Sure I did. Yup. They're superhits, so I'd be a fool not to. Got that right.

Mono progress

[untaken_name]

I had mono once...damn, it sucked. I'm glad to see there's been progress in fighting this disea...erm, whoops. Terribly sorry. I was thinking of something different.

Beagle

[ultrabot]

Interestingly, the summary neglected to mention Beagle, the one Mono application I actually plan on using and that has created some momentum for getting the Mono into various distros.

If Mono proves to be snappier than, say, Java, there might be some hope for it but the spectre of living under the mercy of MSFT is not easy to dodge. It's still there, however much people tried to not talk or think about it.

Re:Beagle

[nberardi]

Everybody talks about living under the mercy of Microsoft when using Mono, but really it isn't an different than living under the mercy of Sun, both companies have their history of sqaushing compitition.

Re:Beagle

[Taladar]

This is why most smart people don't write open source software in Java nor in Mono.

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:Beagle

[LDoggg_]

Huh?
There are thousands of open source java projects.
Here's a few.

Re:Beagle

[Taladar]

Then why is it that my Linux Desktop, using Open Source Software almost exclusively (Opera being the exception) doesn't have one single Java App or Library in the whole dependency tree of all the apps I use? After all there are lots of C, C++, Perl, Python and Ruby apps and libs.

Why is it that anytime someone asks for an example of a decent Java App the Java Fanboys come up with either Eclipse (doesn't count, only useful with Java) or Azureus?

Why is it I have to install old versions of the Java Runtime to run certain InstallAnywhere Installers (like Borland Together, needs 1.3.1, didn't run with 1.4.2 runtime, needed it because a University Software Engineering Course insisted on it). Never had that problem with Perl or Python.

Sure, you may have caught lots of PHBs with all that hype around Java but how much of it really pays off in the real world?

Re:Beagle

[lupus-slash]

Mono is slow and bloated compared with Java.
You obviously didn't measure, see:
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2 005/Fe b-09.html

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,

Re:Wrong punctuation?

[Otter]

Yes, as a rabidly psychotic MooTag fanboy (Nothing has been holding back open-source more than the shortage of half-finished ID3 tag editors!) I am enraged at this obvious favoritism towards Blam! and F-spot!

[Insert requisite stream of sexist abuse towards Eugenia...]

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!

Re:C# Rocks - go mono go.

[jdunn14]

If you're curious about that 64 client limit check out winnt.h and look for MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS (in mine it's on line 1354):
#define MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS 64 // Maximum number of wait objects

This is the limit on the number of objects that can be waited for in WaitForMultipleObjects calls. The same limit is enforced in winsock2 for select calls, I believe because in the end microsoft's select implementation is using WaitForMultipleObjects underneath. (Also note that the winnt.h header file is entirely too large for a single header (9170 lines), but hey, that's window's style for ya).

Re:C# Rocks - go mono go.

[spongman]

socket servers in .NET should be written using the {Begin|End}{Accept|Send|Receive} Socket methods. These methods make usee of completion ports on Win2k and later (and assync-io on Mono) and are the recommended way to ensure scalability. the old Unix 'select' pattern is broken as far as scalability is concerned - even on Unix.

I've had a .NET app handle 100,000+ active TCP connections on a Win2k3 box without blinking an eye.

Just watch out for heap fragmentation caused by pinning your input buffers. It's best to preallocate them in blocks and reuse them when you can.

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.

Re:Dashboard

[watchmaker1]

Dashboard was really just search, and is largely dead. The bones of Dashboard were used to build the framework for Beagle.

You can do dashboard and so much more with the functionality in Beagle. Any future Dashboard-like app would probably be from-scratch on top of a Beagle back end.

Well...

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

Mono is a huge part of my life!

Every morning I get up and feed F-Spot (my Beagle). Then, I get out some eggs, cheese, and MooTag to make myself an omelet. I learned how to cook omelets from Emeril. So, it's Muine & Blam! and my omelets done!

Next, I take a shower and wash off the Bluefunk. Once dressed in my suit and my PolarViewer glasses I call down to Tomboy (our doorman) and have him GIB up a cab.

Once at work it is non-stop Gfaxes and sneaking some time with my SportTracker.

Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm writing this as a mere user, not as a developer, but from my point of view mono really is impressive. Just looking over the list of apps on osnews shows that mono really seems to give developers a framework that let's them develop great application in a relatively short time and in the end it's users like me who profit from that. ;-D

Great works, mono devs.

And to all those trolls that will come out of the woodwork with every mono story, telling us that mono is the end of open source:
Please, for once in your miserable lifes try to provide arguments for your point that go beyond MS is evil (though I would readily agree with that) and therefor mono is the suX0r.

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I love how anything that isn't rabidly pro-Mono instantly gets marked troll.

Guess what: there's this simple problem with Mono. It's OS/2 all over again, except Linux is already losing.

Mono spells the end of the Linux desktop, not that there was any Linux desktop in the first place. Why? Mono offers a path between Linux and Windows that allow you to keep the same apps.

Except that Windows.NET apps are guarenteed to run on Windows, but may not run on Mono, and Mono apps are guarenteed to run on both.

Meaning that you get a larger pool of software on Windows, like you already do. Meaning that there's basically no point in writing a Linux port when you can write a Windows version and claim that it runs under Linux due to Mono.

Mono will help ensure that our desktops and servers continue to run Windows. Sounds like a real win to the open source community.

Linux is already basically cut out of the desktop since people will use whatever comes with their computer, which is universely Windows (or MacOS), and companies will continue to pay top-dollar for whatever the salesman sells them. Mono will help Microsoft in the long run by ensuring that Windows runs more software than Linux does (which it, of course, already does).

In fact, this is already happening to a lesser degree. At one point we were going to buy a Red Hat support contract where I work, but because Apache, MySQL, and Tomcat all run on Windows, we instead decided to stick with Windows 2000 Server, since that's what Dell sells us anyway. We're considering getting new servers, too - which will be running Windows 2003 Server, of course. They'll be running Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, and a CVS server on Windows - because that's what the computer comes with.

If those apps were only available for Linux, we'd probably be running Linux servers right now. But since they have Windows ports, we use Windows instead. It's considered "more secure," too, because IT already tests for Windows security and it would "cost extra" to keep up to date on Linux patches. So - no Linux for us, thanks to portability to Windows.

good

[diegocgteleline.es]

This should stop people using C for things like evolution. Sure C is a great lenguage, but you need to dominate it. Some people knows to use it, most of use humans don't (let's remember the simultaneous 11 buffer overflow vulnerabilities discovered in gaim the past year, making it probably the most insecure IM client ever). And let's no talk about OO, which can help a lot for those final-user apps. C is not a OO language. Yes you can try to use it as OO language like gnome/gtk/glib guys do but they're just trying. A language is either OO or not, C is not. C is a 70's language, stop making gnome "the 70's desktop" with no functional kparts equivalent (bonobo sucks) and use mono, dammit.

Re:good

[grfpopl]

Wow, it's really too bad that people these days think that OO is about a language spec. It's not! OO is a design paradigm! (ugh. i hate that word, but that's what it is.) Your design is either OO or not OO, and the language that you implement it in is irrelevant. All that c++ does that c doesn't is do a few checks in the compiler. You can implement OO designs in C, Scheme, and plenty of other languages that don't have built-in checks for such things. (and yes, c++ does have a number of other features, but they are wholly unrelated to OO) OO doesn't fix buffer overflows either. Why would it? If you have crappy design/use the wrong functions for the wrong things, then you're going to end up with buffer overflows. C# goes quite a ways, as a language, to prevent this, but don't confuse it with OO.

Re:good

[Dan Ost]

A good modular design is not the same as Object-Oriented design. If the design
uses polymorphism, then it's OO, otherwise it's just a modular design. Assuming
you buy into the distinction I just made, it's unusual, but not difficult or impossible,
to do OO in C since the language doesn't explicitly support polymorphism.

In contrast, python makes polymorphism so simple that you often don't even
realize you're doing it. With Java and C#, you either have to share a common
ancester or implement the same interface.

Re:Is there a nice guide online to coding in Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Emerge monodevelop
2. Afaik there even is a plugin for Eclipse

Geeks getting mono?

[Nine Tenths of The W]

This has to be a first.

it's not reverse engineering

[idlake]

Mono is a wonderful piece of reverse engineering

There is no "reverse engineering" involved. These applications are written in C#, an open ECMA standard, and the open source Gtk+ toolkit.

I fear the day when Microsoft will come and snatch this out from under the Mono team,

There is nothing to "snatch": these are applications implemented in a non-Microsoft toolkit using an open language standard.

I really think this benifits Microsoft

I don't see how writing Gnome applications in C# benefits Microsoft any more than writing Gnome applications in C++ or Python.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[shird]

I don't see how writing Gnome applications in C# benefits Microsoft any more than writing Gnome applications in C++ or Python.

Those same applications will also run under Windows, which means people dont have to run a competitors OS to run the software. Plus, they can sell MS Office.NET to Linux users too, as it can run on Linux.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[idlake]

Those same applications will also run under Windows,

These are not .NET applications, they are Gtk+ applications written in C#. As a result, they don't run on Windows or .NET out of the box.

You can run them on Windows, but you can do that with lots of other Gnome and KDE apps as well.

Plus, they can sell MS Office.NET to Linux users too, as it can run on Linux.

I think this would be great for Linux. Unfortunately, Mono will likely never be compatible enough for that, and hell would freeze over before Microsoft would even contemplate such a thing.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[Patoski]

I fear the day when Microsoft will come and snatch this out from under the Mono team,

There is nothing to "snatch": these are applications implemented in a non-Microsoft toolkit using an open language standard.

This isn't 100% accurate since there is also the issue of patents to consider. In order to implement some parts of the .NET standard there would be some "use" of MS patents (I'm talking about ASP.NET and ADO.NET in particular). MS has never said anything about letting people use these parts of .NET and could easily go after Mono over this issue. Even the Mono team acknowledges this as an issue but they promise they'll somehow code around the patent or they just won't implement parts of the standard. Certainly not an optimal solution.

I don't see how writing Gnome applications in C# benefits Microsoft any more than writing Gnome applications in C++ or Python.

MS gets to say that their solution (C#) is cross platform and usable on numerous platforms. In short, publicity.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[ultrabot]

There is nothing to "snatch": these are applications implemented in a non-Microsoft toolkit using an open language standard.

The catch is that C# and CLR are not open standards - they are just ECMA standards. Apparently it was a brilliant move by MSFT because now people will automatically believe CLR is somehow "open". In fact, a while ago Novell was asking MSFT for a clear declaration that Mono does not infringe MSFT IP. Guess what, we never heard what happened with that.

I don't see how writing Gnome applications in C# benefits Microsoft any more than writing Gnome applications in C++ or Python.

It provides a hose that MSFT can step on to end the distribution of the appications. The more critical the app is for Desktop Linux, the better for MSFT. Hopefully the apps that are written in C# will stay small and architecturally open enough to be easily rewritten in another language should that happen. We should never become too dependent on Mono, or Java, or any other proprietary technology.

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

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[idlake]

The catch is that C# and CLR are not open standards - they are just ECMA standards.

That is what an open standard is: something that is published by a recognized standards body and that anybody is free to implement.

Apparently it was a brilliant move by MSFT because now people will automatically believe CLR is somehow "open".

They believe that because it's true. .NET is not open, but ECMA C# is.

In fact, a while ago Novell was asking MSFT for a clear declaration that Mono does not infringe MSFT IP.

Yes, Novell did ask that. That question doesn't refer to ECMA C#, which is as open as any language standard, it refers to Mono's implementation of .NET.

It provides a hose that MSFT can step on to end the distribution of the appications.

Erroneous statements like that seem calculated to create unjustified fear, uncertainty, and doubt about C# in order to keep people from using it. ECMA C# is open. Microsoft can no more "step on its hose" than they can step on C++ or Python or Java (on which, incidentally, they may also hold related patents).

We should never become too dependent on Mono, or Java, or any other proprietary technology.

Mono is not proprietary technology: it's an open source project implementing a de-facto industry standard. As such, it is no different from Linux, for example. As such, Mono consists of two parts: a part that implements an open standard (ECMA C#), and a part that implements a proprietary set of APIs (the parts of .NET that are not in ECMA C#).

If you want to use purely open APIs, just use ECMA C# and Gtk# and don't use any of the non-standard .NET libraries that Mono happens to implement as well. That's what I do.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[lupus-slash]

Please tell us who whose people are so we can remove their code.
We don't decompile the MS libraries as a rule.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[miguel]

I would be very suspicious about such contribution,
because most of the remoting code was written by
Lluis (for all the high-level channels), Dietmar
(for all the low-level remoting bits), Patrik
(which filled a lot of the mid-level details).

All I can think of are stubs, which are not really
useful.

Those were either Novell/Ximian/Intel employees,
and in no case we did disassemble.

For the other pieces like Soap/Remoting, the code
was so broken that it could not have possibly
been copied/decompiled given how useless it was
until we fixed it in various iterations.

I very much doubt your statement, but if it
happens to be true, we have records for each
contribution going to the day zero of the
project and we can track it down.

Miguel.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[miguel]

Thanks for looking into this.

We are auditing the code, and the code that we have
in that area was either completely redone, or what
has not been redone is fairly broken.

I would be surprised if the implementation is
copied.

But if they decompiled to learn how it worked, we
will remove the code anyways.

Miguel.

Re:it's not reverse engineering

[Patoski]

Did you even bother to read what I wrote? These are mostly Gnome applications written in the C# language. They don't use ASP.NET or ADO.NET.

Your point would be well made if all Mono wanted to do was implement C# but obviously Mono looks do to much more than that. I never meant to imply that these early adopter apps use ASP/ADO.NET as they clearly do not. I was merely commenting on the the larger issue touched on by the great grandparent which is the possibility of MS trying to damage Mono somehow (by using an IP / patent club in my example).

Who is to say that MS won't at some later date apply for a patent to some core part of .NET and come after Mono / Novell / Gnome for using it? MS is openly hostile to OSS in general and towards Linux in particular. When asked directly if Mono infringed on MS' IP, MS' silence was deafening.

Depending on the good graces of someone who will go to great lengths to stop Linux is something we ought to consider *very carefully* before embracing Mono with both arms.

The non-standardized parts of .NET are only an issue if you use Mono to deploy your Windows-based ASP.NET or ADO.NET applications on Linux.

Note that Mono very openly encourages and advertises Mono's support for these questionable portions of .NET. Also, ASP and ADO aren't exactly some dusty corner of .NET spec which we can safely assume will infrequently be used.

Your risk and exposure to Microsoft IP results from your choice of using ASP.NET and ADO.NET in the first place; the existence of Mono, if anything, reduces your risk and exposure somewhat, but, of course, it can't completely eliminate it.

Saying that the patent issue is a "red herring" is an enormous stretch. Mono's web site acknowledges that is an issue and even tries to come up with mitigating factors. Heck, Miguel even acknowledges that this is an issue which deserves debate, discussion and may result in the FOSS community having to route around patent damage. I'm not sure why you're trying to paint this as a non-issue when all sides have agreed that it is an issue worthy of discussion.

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

[mattgreen]

This is slated for C# 2.0.

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

[rabtech]

Funny story on that:

VB.NET originally supported this (different access on setter and getter) but since C# didn't support it they dropped it to be compatible... now that C# is gonna support it in the next version they are going back in and re-enabling the feature.

Why it wasn't in originally I don't know, it would seem to be an obvious feature.

From a mono developer..

[zbowling]

I just happen to be one of the few official developers for the mono project, just catching this artical early. Mono is quickly becoming better then ever. The biggest difference between Mono 1.0.x and Mono 1.1.x is the fact that our Just-In-Time compiler (or JIT) is getting more and more amazing every day. The 1.0.x series use a interprator capable of understanding things at the application start. One huge correction is that Mono will be called 1.2 in May not 2.0. While it is true that gtk-sharp-2.0 is moving to 2.0 from 1.0, the Mono runtime will remain at 1.2 as not to be confused with Microsoft.NET 2.0 (all though support for many of .NET 2.0 features will be included). Gtk# being based on Gtk+ 2.2 and Gtk# 2.0 being based on Gtk+ 2.4. Windows support is just as compatable with GTK# as it is on Linux, minus support for Gnome, VFS, GConf, GtkHtml 3 and DBus of course. Hope that helps!

Re:From a mono developer..

[ultrabot]

I just happen to be one of the few official developers for the mono project, just catching this artical early.

Great, now that you are here:

A while (a year or two?) ago Novell was asking MSFT to clarify the IP issues with Mono, or at least to declare that Mono does not infringe MSFT IP, i.e. that it's safe to use. What happened with that? I'd certainly like to get a form of reassurance that it's going to stick around and be safe to code for, esp. with the emergence of projects like IronPython...

Re:From a mono developer..

[zbowling]

Well, there really isn't an issue.

IP issues have been solved a long time ago. While Microsoft didn't publicly comment on IP issues in Mono, the legal department at Novell feels that any action taken by Microsoft against mono would be in amazingly bad faith and for 90% of Mono would be impossible to impose.

The sections that were released under the EMCA filing are public and they will be ours forever. The issues that maybe questionable are parts that were not released on the EMCA but Microsoft has released the source for those under a shared common licence (very restrictive) but allow anyone to "learn" from them as long as the don't take anything tangable (copy and paste, rigth it down) so as much as you can remember while looking at it is yours. The even make the comment in the licence that its a almost needed tool for implimenting your own runtimes. Mono has a personal policy not except code from people who even looked at to avoid all chances of something slipping up in the mess.

Microsoft has communicated with us in the past on different things and we have communictated with them when we find a security flaw in the framework. They even use our code deep in the depths of Microsoft for regression tests (as much as I have heard) and the even demo with our software at conferences and online broadcasts on the power of the .NET Framework.

With all the positive support they have given towards it would be in bad interests to suddenly change on that and would be against anti-trust laws. We are also protected by the EMCA filling because it proves that Microsoft intented for .NET to be a standard and not propiatary. Any patent that Microsoft would try to file would be quickly shot down because of prior art clauses and the fact that Mono is mostly a wrapper (when it comes to the classes not the compiler or the runtime) for libraries that already exist in Linux (in most cases this is true) they would have to file against libraries that even Microsoft used as the basis for their products publicly.

I just don't see any issue. It was a consern when we started before we had time to investigate. :-)

Re:From a mono developer..

[darkmeridian]

There is an old legal aphorism that winning a lawsuit is one of the worse ways to go bankrupt. Even if the case gets dismissed on summary judgment, you have already wasted a lot of time on discovery and pre-trial motions. Think of SCO. And then there are appeals to follow. MS has deep pockets to fund Stupid Lawsuits (TM). Look at SCO. All MSFT has to do is to scare people in corporate settings away from Linux, Mono, or whatever open source program they have declared jihad against.

Re:From a mono developer..

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell better get some new lawyers. Quick. In law school you learn; Lawyers should never speculate. Ever. Either it's legal or it's illegal, the job of a lawyer is to simple interpret and know the law prescribing proper guidance. The diatribe repeated after that usually describes incidents where things are seemingly ok. Children playing on your stoop day in and day out until one of them falls and you're sued etc. You as a lawyer are to warn the client of such things etc etc.

Either Novell has an ace up their sleeve they are willing to take a risk with or they are setting themselves up for failure. Either way; it's going to be costly.

If history is any marker. Microsoft will be attacking Novell within the next 2-3 yrs. Well, unless Microsoft has changed. Well wishing, speculation and positive good seeking doesn't exist when it comes to the letter of the law. If Microsoft hasn't stated in writing in a public forum or fashion that "It's ok for Novell to implement non published ECMA standard stuff into Mono". It doesn't matter how friendly they seem now or how much "interest" they see in it.

Either it's illegal or it's not. If you aren't sure you better find out, or find a firm that will tell you one way or the other. If Novell is going to operate in the speculation waters, they better make the retainer for legal a bit bigger.

Re:Hmm, does realy Mono work..

[Coryoth]

If you're using Mono for GNOME/GTK development, it's actually quite stable, and much more usable than trying to write applications in old-fashioned C.

Yes, but let's be honest here: if you're writing a GTK/GNOME application you're writing a reasonably high level application and pretty much anything (Java, Python, hell even C++, bindings) would be "much more usable" than "old-fashioned C".

Please note that I am not dissing Mono. Variety is nice, and C# does provide a relatively nice language to be able to code GUI applications in. My issue is with the common implication that C# is unique in this - it isn't. Try out PyGTK for instance (particularly with libGlade).

Jedidiah.

Easier Coding Tools = Better Software!!!

[eno2001]

The world of programming has gotten better and be[tt]er over the years. It used to be that you had to have to deal with punch cards or programming right on the metal itself. But in recent years development environments have improved tremendously approaching the ideal: ANYONE can write software even if they don't understand programming.

Take me for example. I work for a Fortune 500 company that is currently working on NextGen database products. I'm the chief software designer. Back when I was in college in the 80s, programming was a black art known only to nerds who wore underpants on their heads and uttered dark incantations. I never really got on with those guys because they just weren't popular enough and they smelled kind of funny.

But thanks to the miracle of the 90s, I am now a software developer myself. My dev suite is comprised of Photoshop (for mock layouts of the UI), Macromedia Flash and MS PowerPoint. With these tools I am crafting the nextgen interfaces that are what put my company at the top. We are drawing lots of attention and turning lots of heads with our products because only we know what the users want these days. Our database product is an award winning package that combines the ambience of Myst and Riven with an Oracle backend and a hint of The Matrix. Users want cool looking apps, not some archaic software that just displays data. Why settle for an app where the text is just displayed in a scroll box, or worse through a terminal emulation program like WRQ Reflection? Our app flys in the text from the side and makes the text sparkle like you see in the intro to a lot of movies. That's the key folks, don't look to Silicon Valley for great software ideas, look at Hollywood. They get it right.

Since I'm a generous guy, I'll share some suggestions about how to design great apps these days:

1. Always make sure that you focus on making the UI look as cool as possible. This requires the use of many tools to make sure that the interface is going to make the user look as good as possible.
2. Always add more features to your application because nothing helps users more than new features. And make them sexy. I'm not talking about adding automatic spell checking or useless shit like that. I'm talking about syncronized sound effects that reflect the actions on screen like you see in the best films.
3. Pervasive use of MPEGs. Our company got away from the old practice of using stupid 16 color icons for button functions and the like because we realized that this was confusing to users. Most of the time those images didn't mean much. Instead, we replaced them with full MPEGs running in loops to represent every possible function a user might do in the real world.
4. Watch all the latest blockbuster scifi films that make use of computer interfaces. The geeks get UI design wrong every time. Only Hollywood knows how to make cool looking UIs and only the best software designers know to take their cues from the film industry.
5. Require that your customers have the most powerful boxes to run your programs. We can't be bothered with idiotic businesses that want to keep desktop systems with PIIIs and 256 megs of RAM. How the hell are you supposed to expect the software to run properly? We tell all of our customers that they must upgrade all desktops to the following minumum requirements: Pentium 4 2.5 GHz or better, with 1 gig of RAM. That just barely keeps up with our advanced software, but it's the minimum. (Alienware makes the best business machines we've seen)

It makes me laugh when I see you geeks trying to come up with new programming languages and platforms. Mono. What a joke. You call that progress? I don't. Keep working on more tools like Photoshop, Flash and PowerPoint. That's where development is these days. All that antiquated complicated crap is just mental masturbation for losers with no life. I read an article recently about a company that is working on self writing software. If these guys succeed, and they partner up

Re:Question about GTK#

[zbowling]

GTK# works wonderful without even even being related to Mono in anyway. It runs under Microsoft.NET just as well as it does on Mono under windows.

My good friend Paco (Fransico Martieneze) has posted a installer for .NET SDK 1.1 and it includes documention for it and even some intergration with Visual Studio as well.

http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?g tk s-inst4win

Stop being a crusty slashbot.

[Inoshiro]

How is this not like life?

Ford Explorer -- does that also access the internet?

Hyundai Accent -- is it about the korean language?

Honda Accord -- music perhaps?

People make names which they feel are the best for something. They rely on something's ability to be good at it to spread the love, so to speak. If it's good, people will remember it. If it's not good, it goes away and it's no issue. Do you really like how people went to ultrageneric names and domain speculation on the Internet? Pets.com? Mail.com? News.com?

Take a look at things which people remember. What about Napster implies filesharing? What about Suprnova? What about Google implies searching?

Naming is a magic game. Just because you don't like how others play it, does not mean they are playing it wrong. This whole "incorrect naming" meme is stupid and pointless. Start thinking critically about what you're saying before you repeat it everywhere.

Re:You were right the first time.

[untaken_name]

Yeah well...I hear that Open Source is a total whore. Anyone who wants to can 'get in'. Bill shoulda known better.

Story time

[buddha42]

Could someone in the know please explain how Mono will not suffer the fate of samba or that attempt to get ASP working on nix (chilisoft? I forget)?

I don't know the detailed inner workings, but it seems like these projects are forever doomed to being a shadow of a "mostly" implimentation riddled with "gotchas" and always a few steps behind. I don't blame the developers in any way, its just we all know MS does not play nice with others.

Re:Story time

[ed__]

first, their is a published spec.

secondly, mono is more about enabling developers to use C# and CLR, rather than allowing people to run windows software on *nix, so there isn't the same necessity for bug-for-bug compatibility as there is in samba (where you want to look exactly like a Windows box from the outside).

Re:Story time

[damiam]

The fate of samba? Last time I checked, Samba was alive and well. And if anything, Mono has an advantage over samba in that it doesn't have to be Windows-compatible to be useful. C# is a great language (supposedly; I've never used it) and an open-source Linux implementation can only be a good thing. All of the apps mentioned in the intro are native GTK apps, and will continue to work well and be developed even if MS does something to break Windows compatibility.

Mono has a long way to go, even in OSS

[Glock27]

Statistics from Sourceforge:

Java (14080 projects)
C# (2206 projects)

Also, don't forget there is a very interesting ahead-of-time Java compiler as part of the gcc toolchain, gcj. It isn't complete, but it is constantly improving and can now be used to write SWT and Gnome applications. Good stuff!

I hate to see C# getting any uptake when all it is intended to do is allow Microsoft to co-opt all of Java's good ideas while stifling portability as much as possible. It is a transparent Java ripoff.

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.

Driving developers to windows

[acomj]

I don't have anything agains mono, and the C#/java seem pretty much identicle to my mind (There's nothing that compelling that one has thats not in the other).

Its great to have a language that can come installed with linux (java cough* cough*). However mono ultimately will work OK, but will drive developers to windows in droves because of the better deveopment environment that Visual Studio.net offers.

I fear that ultimately there will be mono apps that can run sometimes on windows (if you install gtk# etc...etc.) and .net apps that might run on linux if you didn't use this package or that package.

Mono has its place, but I don't think cross platform apps is going to happen.

Re:Driving developers to windows

[LnxAddct]

Fedora comes with gcj (gcc java compiler) and that compiles most swt and gnome applications jsut fine. Also there are a few very good open source JVMs, the first one off the top of my head is Blackdown, which I use to develop java3d on linux. I have yet to see blackdown not do something that Sun's can.
Regards,
Steve

Almost 100% Agreed.

[warrax_666]

Your design is either OO or not OO, and the language that you implement it in is irrelevant.

By extension, you could just as easily say that the implementation language never matters, it's all just a Turing Machine(*) anyway. Except it does matter. Support for cleaner syntax, extra type checking, virtual/non-virtual method dispatch, etc. all matter when implementing an OO design. You can avoid whole classes of bugs by having proper language support, and programmer time can be reduced considerably.

(*) We'll conveniently ignore the fact that computers aren't really TMs here. The point is still valid.

Re:Almost 100% Agreed.

[rjh]

Have you ever seen an OO design in PROLOG?

It usually starts with this: "First, implement LISP..."

Have you ever seen backwards-chaining declarative logic designs in Scheme?

It usually starts with "First, implement PROLOG..."

I wish I was kidding.

What are the good bits of which you speak?

[pmike_bauer]

What are these good bits of which you speak? Or are we (yet again) confusing Java, the language, and Java, the platform? An argument can be made that the C# language learned and improved upon the Java language's experience. On the other hand, comparing the two platforms (i.e. runtimes and libraries) is a whole different bag. Granted, C# and .Net are possibly the best technologies to use if you are developing Windows applications. But, to assert that these are the best options in any other environment is simply ludicrous. Mono is in no way as mature, stable, feature rich (you name it) as the Java platform. Pray tell where is my Mono equivalent of Jakarta, Java3D, Maven, HotSpotVM, Tapestry, Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, yadatada? When you find them, then come back and tell me C# has "all the good bits." Mono may have the potential to become what Java is today, but its not there yet.

Wow

[kahei]

Actually, reading that statistic I was impressed by how well C# is doing -- 1/7th as many projects as Java, and really all in about 2 years, and in the OSS community which isn't exactly MS's core area.

I think MS have recaptured a bit of their old magic here, in lowering the 'energy threshold' required to get a project going. That's what made VB and Excel so ubiquitous -- I'm not saying that that was a good thing, but it sure worked. The work you have to do to create, package and distribute a .net app is just significantly less than for a java app. If I never see another classpath or another teeny little xml file that has to just match the Java code in some other file, I will be sooooo happy.

Of course, I'm far from declaring victory for .net. But 2000 on sourceforge is a good sign, not a bad one.

The naming of cars is a difficult matter

[metamatic]

Ten cars which sound like Robert Ludlum novels:

1. The Honda Accord
2. The Isuzu Axiom
3. The Buick Rendezvous
4. The Mazda Protegé
5. The Alfa Quadrifoglio
6. The Diahatsu Charade
7. The Lambourghini Murcielago
8. The Mitsubishi Endeavor
9. The Oldsmobile Intrigue
10. The Subaru Legacy

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:Did you forget about wxNET?

[TheRaven64]

How many times do we have to have the myth of cross platform UIs repeated? 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. Using native widgets does not make an app that matches the HIGs, it just removes an important visual clue from the user that the app is not going to. A better solution would be to go the Java route and develop a set of HIGs for Java/Swing/Metal apps, so that anything that looks like a Java/Metal app behaves in the same way, giving people a subconscious visual clue that they are going to be different from their apps, but consistent within the context of the Java (or Mono, or whatever) platform.

MonoDevelop 0.5.1 and Mono 1.1.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the latest stable release of MonoDevelop will not compile against Mono 1.1.4. If you need an IDE for your Mono work, you would have to check out the Mono sources from SVN. The SVN version of Mono also has its dependencies, many of which also would have to be checked out of SVN repositories. So, while Mono 1.1.4 is available, for the time being, I have to stick with 1.0.6 in order to continue working within an IDE framework.

Which bit of Java isn't open ?

[MosesJones]

C# is an ECMA standard (which of course with generics et al Microsoft is breaking). This is NOT open, and certainly not in comparison to Java.

The Java Community Process go to the site and have a look at the "closed" and unchangable monstor that Sun has created. I mean its just scary to think that Java 6.0 is ASKING FOR JOINERS, to input into the next standard.

How would you become an ECMA member and propose changes to C# ?

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.

Live Code Examples for Mono

[__aabjlj9081]

Zamples provides a facility for live code examples for C# and and VB.NET using Mono. Novell (sponsor of the Mono project) was kind enough to publish a news brief about us last month. Zamples also provides a live code facility for Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, Haskell and various APIs. Learning by example is a fast way to learn, and Zamples is a good way for authors and software publishers to present their information interactively.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Zamples, Inc. Go gently on our servers, they probably won't survive being slashdotted!

Re:Take the Mono Challenge !!!

[lupus-slash]

What distinct advantages does Mono have over either of these established and supported platforms ?

Contrary to both the JVM and MS .Net, Mono is free software. Mono is also cross-platform, running on Linux, MacOSX, Windows, Solaris and others on at least 5 different processor architectures.
And we're rapidly improving to support better server workloads.

Ignorants babble what they don't understand...

[Spy der Mann]

Have you EVER used wxWidgets? No, have you even READ TF website?

wxWidgets is NOT an EMULATOR layer. It's a parallel implementation of an UI using the Native OS's widgets. From the wxWidgets site: "the open source, cross-platform native UI framework
with twelve years of evolution behind it".

It's not about how a widget should LOOK or FEEL. It's about using THE SAME CODE to make a program.

They even got a PalmOS version now.

Maybe for your small needs you don't need cross-platform. Maybe you're happy crunching bits and recompiling the most of your kernel, but you're certainly not the average Joe User - and that's a majority that has needs. These people right now are screaming when their machines are being invaded by spyware, viruses (and coming soon, rootkits)
. These people need to escape. And cross-platform applications is the way to go.

But if you really want to help people migrate from Windows to a safer Linux environment without losing their friendly commodities, at least you should give programmers the benefit of the doubt.

I AM a windows user. But I'm planning on migrating. And I want OTHER people to migrate to Linux. Linux doesn't belong to elitists... it belongs to the world, that's why it's Open Source, and GPL licensed. So please, stop building iron walls and let the Windows prisoners escape to a safer world.

After all, don't you want to be among the ones who were there, the day Microsoft died?

Certainly, I do.

Re:Mono Sucks!

[lupus-slash]

There are issues running Mono on FreeBSD because FreeBSD has broken thread libs. Some of the fixes are in the latests 5.x releases, but there may be still more issues.

Re:Did you forget about wxNET?

[Abcd1234]

Sounds like XUL, XAML, the Glade XML format, or Renaissance (an OpenStep GUI builder) to me... you express the GUI in some logical fashion, and ask the underlying OS toolkit (whatever that is... Gtk, KDE, etc) to render it.

Re:Take the Mono Challenge !!!

[MrData]

What do you mean when you say that Mono is "free" ?

Do you mean that it is available at no cost ?
If this is the case, then so is Java's runtime AND development environment.

If not then I assume you mean it is "open-source", which is confusing since:

• The Mono FAQ page claims to implement the Microsoft .NET development platform which it has no legal right to
• Mono consists of three separate licenses, one for the C# compliler, one for the runtimes, and another for the class libraries

Secondly, why do I need a Windows version of Mono when as stated in the projects FAQ, Question 1: What Exactly is Mono ?:


The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Novell that is working to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform.


(See the http://www.mono-project.comabout/index.html page for details)

mostly great, BUT....

[nikkoslack]

Lack of webservices is a major stumbling block for my development team. We'd love to be runnning on Mono vs. .Net, but the lack of even a light at the end of the tunnel for web service integration is keeping LOTS of developers at bay.

Also, the list of dependencies to run monodevelop is astronomical. After my 7th or 8th trip to google to find some arcane dependency, I gave up. I think it's better if you are running gnome, but not much.

Re:Did you forget about wxNET?

[Delos]

How many times do we have to have the myth of cross platform UIs repeated?

As long as people keep downloading Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

I'll say this...

[agraupe]

C# is every bit as good as Java at this point. That being said, being Java's equal is not a stunning approval. I like its design, and its similarity to C/C++. I would say anyone interested in cross-platform development (Windows too, not just different *nixes) should take a serious look at Mono/.NET/C#.

Having recently considered learning C#/Mono, a few things bugged me. Firstly, it was not easy to find a tutorial more complex than Hello World but less complex than "oh, look, we're going to be making a wordpad clone". Considering that it is much easier to program with C and GTK, or C++ and QT or GTK--, it will take some serious work to make Mono attractive if you're looking to attract the people who don't need Windows compatibility.