Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development

Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.

Comments

Re:Yeah, that's always been my reaction

[Dutch Gun]

No, that's absurd. .NET will be around for decades to come. There's too much infrastructure built on top of it, and there's no reason for Microsoft to abandon it, since it's still the modern way to write Windows applications, for both app store & full desktop applications. As long as Windows is around in its current incarnation, .NET will be around as well. Whether it will be around on *other* platforms is up for debate, but I suspect that it will at least be maintained at it's current level.

BTW, COM is still supported, and you could write a new VB6 app even today if you really wanted to. And HTML5/JavaScript killed Silverlight, not MS. Hell, it killed *Flash*, so it's a bit hard to blame that on MS.