Submitted by “Miguel De Icaza has been a major mover of Mono, the open-source framework for .NET since the get-go. These days he shepherds Mono along from within Novell. At Novell’s BrainShare conference, he discussed the latest doings with writer Paul Ferrill.”
“Miguel De Icaza has been a major mover of Mono, the open-source framework for .NET since the get-go. These days he shepherds Mono along from within Novell. At Novell’s BrainShare conference, he discussed the latest doings with writer Paul Ferrill.”
has taken more time than we wanted not because of Windows Forms but because Mono started to get adopted inside of Novell. In fact it has started ot catch on like fire.
I saw a link somewhere to an analysis of a Vista release, saying that the amount of .Net assemblies contained therein was absurdly low.
How ironic would it be to have Mr. Softy’s “bet the company” product get more love from a Gnome-based GNU/Linux than its own momma?
And this was because .Net 2.0 was in beta during Vista’s development (which is five years and counting) and they did not want to slow down development further by working with buggy tools.
The applications of Mono within Novell have all been fairly small and simple thus far (what Zenworks does is not particularly complex); very few of them have been officially released; and none of them are particularly complex. Microsoft does have some .Net applications in development (the delayed MS Paint replacement, Acrylic, being just one), but Vista and Office are the priority at the moment, and .Net just doesn’t fit in there.
And this was because .Net 2.0 was in beta during Vista’s development (which is five years and counting) and they did not want to slow down development further by working with buggy tools.
Sorry, but .Net has been all the rage for ~5 years? If not now, when? While managed code may not make any kind of sense for core services, there is a small mountain of administrative stuff which, if .Net were really a ‘bet the company’ affair, would have made perfect sense.
On the other hand, given Redmond’s apparent unwillingness to eat its own dogfood, the question becomes: at what point will some successor technology come along to save us from the (apparent) shortcomings of .Net?
keep up the good work.
Miguel’s blog ( http://tirania.org/blog/ ) is always a good read.
Im not so worry about Windows Forms as long my bussines rules layer can compile w/o problems.
Great read! Keep tracking Miguel, Novell and the release of mono:: 1.2.
Thanks
So, is everyone here feeling good about Mono’s legal standing? Is MS waiting for it to take off before crushing it? This question has not been answered to my satisfaction.
This question has not been answered to my satisfaction.
And prolly never will.
This question has not been answered to my satisfaction.
As the saying goes, “There are no guarantees in life.” The mono open source implementation I don’t have any problems using since C# is a standardized language. The windows.forms classes are all proprietary and are protected by intellectual property patents. They are still a gray zone and I would avoid using them until significant evidence builds to show that Microsoft will not run to protect that intellectual property. There is no real answer on this matter since it is unresolved and really hasn’t been tested yet legally.
A safer route to develop commercial applications would be to combine C# with GTK widgets via GTK#. This would yield a true cross-platform application without questions of intellectual property violations. Keep in mind you would have to install the GTK runtime on your windows clients. To see an example of GTK working on Windows download Gimp 2.0 image editor for Windows.
Edited 2006-03-30 22:27
Another advantage with GTK is it’s a far more powerful toolkit, and once you get used to it, it’s much quicker to develop with.
I believe there’s also something for using qt if you prefer it. But basically: There’s only one good reason to use Winforms, and that’s that you can’t afford to have the dependency.
Thanks buff and ma_d for the well-explained responses. Sounds like there is plenty of “safe” stuff to work with. For those who modded me down…. uh, why?
As the saying goes, “There are no guarantees in life.” The mono open source implementation I don’t have any problems using since C# is a standardized language.
I’m afraid not. A lot of people like to tell us that Mono is just as unsafe as anything else, but it isn’t and there is not ‘plenty of safe’, standardised stuff.
The submission of any standard to the ECMA does not protect anyone against any patents, IP claims etc. that anyone may have on it. All that is required is a very basic signed document from the submitter to play fair ‘for the duration that they are ECMA members and their submissions remain ECMA standards’. It is not legally binding. Should they decide not to play fair then the worst case scenario is that the standards submitted would cease to be ECMA standards and Microsoft may be asked to leave the ECMA committee. I hardly think that’s going to bother them, because that doesn’t stop them using it, obviously. However, everyone else is up in the air.
Additonally, if you read Microsoft’s patents, what does make them dangerous is that they specify that they are applicable to anyone adhering to the ECMA stuff, and use terms like ‘running on a CLR’ etc. If you are running on an ECMA compliant CLR then that applies to you. If you were to implement something similar on a JVM environment, for example, then that would be the grey area everyone talks about. However, since Microsoft want to protect their own IP and inventions first, they specifically mention the ECMA, CLR, CLS etc. the the exclusion of everything else.
How so? are you scared about running Linux, and the possibility that it tramples on 4000 difference patents, including some held by Microsoft?
Please, Mono is out there, and Microsoft can jump scream till the cows come home, but it won’t change the fact that once something is out of the box, the chances of them trying to get something out of their patent portfolio is minor.
Personally, Microsoft doesn’t care; they know that Mono, in regards to Microsoft .NET compatibility will always be behind the eighth ball, and in regards to development, its pretty clear; if one were developing C# applications, they would be running Windows and VS.NET because the current crop of IDE’s for C# are absolutely terrible.
Another advantage with GTK is it’s a far more powerful toolkit, and once you get used to it, it’s much quicker to develop with.
How is GTK# better than WinForms? I know it has superior layout management, but I’m not clear on any other criteria that makes it better. I’d be interested to hear what they are.
The fact that GTK# tracks the GTK enhancements as they’re added rather than with Winforms, which will be a matter of Microsoft developing, and mono playing catch up.
GTK# is layed upon GTK, so, it has superior layout management, but also superior i18n/l10n support (multilanguage in documents for example), superior a11y support, is more portable. That was comes to my mind right away, but I’m sure I forgot some things (like superior session management).
As an experiment we tried one of out windows .net apps on the mac version of mono today (no winforms) and it worked first time. No classpaths to set up, no complicated command line arguments, just click and go. This finally convinced me that the promise of painlessly moving windows apps to mac (and most likely linux) is very close to being true.
Has anyone said anything about the look and feel of Win Forms application in mono? Will it use the native look and feel on the currently running OS? or will it use it’s own look and feel like old Java applications?
If I remember right the Mac look and feel was ok, but the linux and windows versions were not very good. Hopefully future releases will be better. The worst aspect of Winforms, apart from the bugs, is that it can be glacially slow to respond on the mac and linux which makes it almost unusable. If you thought Java SWING was slow, winforms under linux and the mac is much worse.
Unity ( http://www.unity3d.com/ ) is the coolest Mono (or .NET) application I’ve run across… it’s a 3D game engine IDE with support for all kinds of awesome features and a reasonable price for hobbyists.
– chrish