Fedora Core 5 includes Mono

cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

Comments

Easily run

[DrXym]

Someone has obviously never tried running a .NET application under Mono. More often than not, it calls Win32 via PInvoke, uses an ActiveX control / COM interop, or does something else which renders it unusable on other platforms. Some apps might work, particularly command line tools, but it is by no means guaranteed or even probable.

And this is probably what MS had in mind all along. And I don't see it changing either. Microsoft make it easy to slap together apps with their stack and tools. Mono makes it hard to do the same with theirs. That means Mono will constantly be playing catch-up with Microsoft, reaching for but never getting close to 100% compatibility.

talking about exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.

How about

This may mean that in the future, some native Windows applications will run on Linux, with Mono.

Re:Summary

[timeOday]

Yes, off topic, but it's nice to see a well written and concise topic summary around here once in a while.

But how accurate is it?

This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.

I think that's far premature. Without even knowing yet what the catch is, I know there will be some. I just don't think Microsoft will let Windows apps seamlessly run under Linux, one way or another.

Some interesting stuff coming in .NET

[Sanity]

Microsoft has some interesting technologies in the pipeline for .NET 3.0. One of the most exciting is LINQ which will change the way we interact with SQL databases, and data in general from within our code. Other language enhancements will mean that Java has a lot of catching up to do (and no, I'm not a M$ fanboy, Java is my tool of choice and I use a Mac).

The question is: Will Mono support these new features, and if so, when?

Vista will muddle the developer landscape

[boxlight]

Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista

As a developer, I have great concern over how Vista will muddle the Windows landscape. Microsoft is creating a situation where developers have to build and test for way too many Windows platforms.

That is, many developers and network administrators use Windows 2000 exclusively and most other pros and home users use XP -- and my father in law still uses Windows 98. NONE of these people have any intention of upgrading to Vista. So Vista will likely only be installed on new PCs

It's getting to the point where there's just too many versions of Windows out there to support:

Win 98 SE
Win 2k Workstation and Server(s)
Win XP Home and Pro
Win Vista??

And the pointy-haired-bosses will continue to shout that *all* versions of Windows must be supported. That means more development, more testing, more installers, more deep sighs.

The "write once run anywhere" of Java is becoming more attractive all the time.

boxlight

What I want to know is .....

[ajs318]

..... why wasn't the Open Source clone of the "C#" programming language called "Db" ?

Re:Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?

[MobyDisk]

Actually it is quite easy because of one crucial difference. It's not the implementation that matters, it is the interface. And .NET provides a good interface.

Even if Microsoft implemented the .NET APIs as wrappers around Windows APIs, the fact is that the APIs are clean and they are well documented. They follow the rules of encapsulation well. That makes it possible to re-implement them in a straightforward fashion. The problem with WINE is that the Windows API does not follow good design and rules of encapsulation, so the implementation is often exposed. WINE is not an implementation of an API as much as it is a reverse-engineering of one. But that problem goes away with .NET.

Mono today works stunningly well today. The only issue is Windows Forms, because it isn't as well encapsulated as the rest of the API.

Re:Mono and python

[m50d]

How is it a boil? It's a great language, very useful, makes the base system smaller overall (because so many things can be made much smaller in python) and is nice to be able to depend on it being available. Slating distributions for depending on python is like criticising them for depending on libc.

Re:Summary

[Jugalator]

Yes, as far as I know, there are no plans to clone "WinFX" at this point for Vista compatibility.

WinFX is far from required for "Vista compatibility". Basically no applications will use WinFX when Vista is released, and I have to wonder how many Windows developers are actually ready to jump ship from unmanaged C++ to .NET and WinFX. The new WinFX development models with e.g. Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML for UI development, etc. are totally incompatible with current C++ applications. It feels like several years ahead at the very least.

As for the Windows.Forms namespace, it's well underway actually. In the November 2005 status report, word is:

Windows.Forms is the only piece that is holding us from officially renaming Mono to Mono 1.2, it is still missing a few features. Our plan is to complete the missing features by the end of this month and then move to bug fixing and testing open source our publicly accessible Windows.Forms applications. We are planning on spending three months on bug fixing at this point.

This hardly sounds too unattainable to me.

And before anyone asks, no, Windows Forms 2.0 support isn't required for "Vista compatibility" either.