Man! A lot of people still don't get it, do they?
I know that this may be a can of worms that I may not want to open, but we say in Spanish: "Si es mudo explota" -- "If he is mute he would explode". I can't help but to be frustrated by the contents of some articles like the one on UK.builder.com.
Here you hear once more that developers who buy into .NET are not interested in developing or targeting other platforms other than Windows. Those who would want to have Linux then rather use PHP, Perl, etc. That is so crazy and ignorant that it doesn't make any sense! Or maybe, the people expressing those opinions are not "Real Software Engineers" -- or good business people for that matter.
It is NOT an all or nothing proposition. You can develop in Visual Studio and very well target Linux, Mac OS X and anything else that runs Mono. As much as I use the totally cool MonoDevelop (a.k.a Bad Ass IDE of the future), I still use Visual Studio .NET 2003 quite regularly. In fact, now that I have discovered the beauty of VMWare, it will be that much more comfortable to create projects in Visual Studio that are resting on a VMWare shared folder and use them instantly in the Linux host.
But make no mistake, that is just one of those rich kids whim of mine. I have, for the past two years, used a Windows box that has mapped drives to my Samba enabled Linux boxes to achieved the same effect.
One must also keep in mind the great utility of Mono's Windows incarnation. Thanks to my add-in (sorry for the shameless plug) you can use Visual Studio and test in Mono without having a Linux or Mac OS box anywhere in sight. In some cases, I very purposefully create Mono applications using handy dandy Visual Studio .NET 2003 with the intention to deploy and run in Windows boxes whose only .NET Framework runtime is the Mono for Windows SDK.
In the early 1980's IBM put out the specifications for the PC and regardless of what were their intentions back then, the world of IT has become what it is today because of all of the innovations that we later had by contributors like Compaq, Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba and many others.
Today, being a .NET developer that only wants to use .NET in Windows would be as silly as a PC user back in 1987 who only wanted to use IBM hardware.
I say we have an extremely similar situation with the original submission from Microsoft to the ECMA of the C# language and the CLI specification. Now, in 2005, you have a great group of contributors that include Novell, Microsoft, IBM, HP and many others.
But perhaps the most striking difference from my IBM PC analogy is the role of the individual contributor. You see, I want to suggest that Open Source .NET will be much bigger -- and better for everyone -- than Microsoft .NET alone.
No really, from a business perspective, you would have to be brain damaged to create an application or system of any sort and not hope that it can run in as many platforms (meaning customers that are willing to pay) as possible!
So you mean to tell me that there is some .NET developer at the PDC or elsewhere that would not grin once he/she sees their application running on Linux or Mac OS X?
For GOD sake, GET A CLUE!!!!
We are building .NET applications today using various Microsoft and OpenSource technologies. In fact we are drooling over the idea that our application which has a client and server piece could run very soon on Linux servers. I'd love to run Spring.net and Nhibernate inside the mono application server.
There is a disconnect on the desktop though. I know GTK# is looking good and I know cocoa# is coming along but we are building a skinnable windows forms desktop client using 3rd party winform controls from DevExpress because the standard Windows Forms control libraries are so sucky.
Desktop applications today suck. The widgets are 10-20 years old in their concept and were designed for computers with a 10th of the computing power of today's computers. I' like to see more applications built like Google's Picasa, Google Earth, etc...
Mono needs to get on this XAML bandwagon fast because it would make TONS of sense to write XAML based applications that would be able to run on any Mono enabled platform. Use System.Drawing / Cairo to draw all the widgets OpenGL accelerated.
If this were the case our applications would run on the desktop with no problems.
I do not see why mono could not support XAML. I mean it’s just an XML based language that really in the background is being compiled into c# or VB.net. Then again we have had languages like XUL or boxly for awhile now. What I think the major issues are with those languages is they are not as mainstream and they do not have any real editor; the support for them tends to lack.
Now as far as running .Net applications on other OS’s like Linux and OS X, I am all for it but, I think the reason we see this massive push for only deving .Net applications for Windows, is because you have to remember who is deving these products. Not saying that all people are useless but there is a reason why people do .net Development and not OS X Dev or Linux Dev because it tends to be much simpler. The amount of people who struggle with Linux in the windows world is just nuts, throw in the OS X and your really have an issue because a lot of these people just have no clue. Could you see a migration to a more open world where .Net developers target other OSs? Sure I think in time and maybe it’s not that far off. But, at the current moment I just do not see the big push of Mono and its efforts…. Do I support? Yes, I do and I am sure there are a good group of others that do as well.
Very nice! I'm putting you at my favourits. Small brain blog: http://blog.warmfuzzy.com/index.php/2005/09/06/of-notebooks-and-writers-tools/ , Coin World magazine
Posted by: Joseph Ballard at September 19, 2005 11:59 AMThanks for the info on prj2make. I am running VS2003 and I couldn't get it to work. Who can I contact to get support on this thing?
Posted by: Joe at September 24, 2005 06:16 PM