There was an official Mono Meeting Day a few days ago and now Novell has published their slides online in PDF form. Scheduling of upcoming versions of Mono are discussed among others.
Slides from Mono’s Meeting
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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You can complement the Visual Studio and Mono presentation, with some of the screen casts that are available in these two blog entries.
Visual Studio and the Mono Add-in
http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/archives/000111.html
InstallerMaker ScreenCasts
http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/archives/000140.html
The screencasts in these blog entries are almost identical to the Demonstrations done the day of the talks.
I found the Mainsoft presentation interesting, since they’re the only one who has a business and is making any real money. I’ve used some of their software before and it’s quite impressive stuff, if a bit expensive at times.
Basically, their angle is to allow people to use Visual Studio and .Net on Windows to develop, but giving them various extensions to be able to compile and/or deploy for Java and J2EE servers, so they can use one IDE and development framework for everything – in theory. Not a bad idea, given the circumstances in many development environments in many companies.
Their presentation is interesting in that it reveals where the market really is when it comes to Linux/Unix, .Net and Java:
http://www.go-mono.com/meeting06/Mono_Meeting_2006_-_Mainsoft.pdf
“Committed to pure J2EE runtime
Focus on server technologies only
– System.Web – yes, Windows.Forms – no”
“.NET Framework shared with Mono
– System.Web hosted on top of Java Servlets and JSR 168 Portlets”
Java and .Net front-end interoperability is a real problem in all the companies I’ve seen, and most have had limited success. I’ve seen some who’ve used Ja.Net with limited success, and even worse, web services. Ja.Net is basically a Java implementation of DCOM for network interoperability, but it isn’t enough. You need some framework where you can guarantee what you’re passing reliably, without any inexplicable errors. Web services are extremely limited, buggy and very error prone to use internally despite the hype.
Edited 2006-11-12 13:22
If I recall currectly they have been doing this kind of thing for a while. I was came across a CD with Microsoft Internet Explorer for UNIX that I think they had a hand in porting … and this was almost 8-9 years ago.