What makes a Mono developer tick? Linux format has a brief interview with Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, two prominent Mono coders who’ve just written a book on the open source .NET implementation. They explain the advantages of C# over other languages, and give a bit of advice for budding Mono app developers.
Interview: the Men of Mono
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This sounds funny
Yeah like where’s the calendar. Is it hosted on Flickr
Yeah, but they’re all sick! 😉
while I agree with pretty much everything said this interview is really nothing new. Well other than a linux guy recommending that you use MS as a source of information ( he’s right though ).
I am a lot more interested about the future of the project but I guess that would be a little bit too much to ask for.
I am concerned about the lack of progress in delivering WinForms, although GTK# is capable, I am more interested in using WinForms for crossplatform work and at the moment it just justn’t really work.
I think they want .Net 2.0 compatibility first.
I think they want .Net 2.0 compatibility first.
Hmmm. It really does depend on what is meant by .Net 2.0 compatiblity, because you can go on trying to achieve that for years.
Well, there’s been an advance in the Winforms area, and it’s planned to have most the api done for the 1.2 release. However, you can try the current status checking out the code from the mono svn.
Carlos.
Like most things in the free software world nothing comes without work. According to http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/archives/000128.html if the community wants winforms support then they need to help test it.
So go and find a windows form application, download mono and winforms, and test it out! Submit bug reports and comments in the appropriate places and be positive!
Good things take time. In doing the above it made me realise, holy s$%t thats an amazing piece of coding which allows me to pick a random .net app from codeproject.com and have it run, unmodified, on linux!
Usually when I go find a winforms app to test in mono – it’s NOT winforms support that is lacking – but usually something else. Many of the apps I try to run under mono just simply die with no error in the console (even with verbose and debug output on)
Mono is still missing some non-winforms support that prevents many VStudio-built apps from running properly.
But otherwise, I love the project, and I try out new versions when they’re available!
I agree. Its usually stupid little things like people hard coding path seperators (/ vs ) and network stuff (have to run as sudo).
But on the whole I agree that mono is there in most part (and getting there) for the rest.
Its the damn 80/20 rule – 80% of the work takes 20% of the time!
I agree. Its usually stupid little things like people hard coding path seperators (/ vs ) and network stuff (have to run as sudo).
Well, we need to know such things to fix them. You use it, it fails, we fix it. A lot of times, the documentation in msdn is not very clear, and we have to make some assumptions, and have a first implementation. Then, when colaborators come and use the code, we have the chance to know if the implementation is wrong.
That’s one of the problems implementing a compatible product of MS 😉
Instead of using the Microsoft WinForms API to develop applications that run great on windows and okay on linux. Why not use Gtk# to develop applications that run great on linux and okay on windows? Really gtk# is as cross platform as Windows.Forms will be when it works completely in mono.
Its not a brief interview as being said, its a deep and troughout interview. I have the Linux Format lying in front of me here.
Also its not that they explain the advantages of C# over other languages, but explain why they think it has an advantage over other languages. That is completly different. They also say that Java can do anything C# can but the not like its nature more or less.
Edited 2006-03-15 21:34
Sadly i’m not living in the UK, so i cant get the “Linux Format”.
Does someone knows how i can get the interview nevertheless? Maybe they have an archive were i can find it in some weeks or so?
As a answere for people who are asking for WindowForms.
I wouldn’t invest to much time in learning/using WindowForms. WindowForms are dead, with vista MS will switch to a new toolkit. And for GNU/* *BSD Systems Gtk# is the prefered toolkit and cross-platform ability improves from version to version. So I would say for everyone who isn’t a MS-only user Gtk# is definitely the way to go.
I do also not live in the UK.
Its no problem to subsribe if you live outside of the UK.
In the Netherlands it is thankfully quite easy to find Linux Format in book- & magazinestores. They even sell it at the small bookshop at the local trainstation.
We download the release version of mono regularly to check on winforms status. We have a bunch of MS apps we want to port over to linux and mac but for the moment mono is not ready (mac in particular). Progress is being made but only slowly.
This summer we’ve decided to use QT for new apps rather than wait for winforms (it was a choice between Java and QT, and Java apps tend to look awful so it was QT in the end). I know people will say, contribute yourself to speed up development, trouble is, as much as that would be desirable, we don’t have the resource. Easier sometimes just buy, for a few K dolalrs, a ready made kit like QT (a few K will only pay someone for 2 or 3 weeks so it’s not a large amount of money).
As for not using winforms because MS is moving to the next great thing, one has to remember that we need something now, not later. Winforms will be around for a long time and it works (at least on Windows) now. The next MS stuff will not be ready for crossplatform for many years to come. As for GTK#, sure people use it, but our primary dev platform is VS (secondary is Delphi) and GTK# is not integrated in VS like Winforms.
Break the .NET compatibility and make mono a whole new language?
Break the .NET compatibility and make mono a whole new language?
There is some added functionality in Mono (Gtk#, Mono assemblies, etc).
However, introducing big changes brings the problem of losing the compatibility between them, which is a very helpful thing for a lot of developers, and something that we would like to keep.