MONO - lost it's way?
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
Their
double.TryParse()still throws exceptions... :sigh:**
xacc.ide-0.2.0.75 - now with C# 3.5 support and Navigation Bar!
**
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
John Cardinal wrote:
I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way.
Last years marketing pitch that is having a hard time finding relevance in this years market direction. :doh:
John Cardinal wrote:
they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months.
This years marketing strategy. :~
John Cardinal wrote:
The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc.
All the bits you need to make a professional application. :rolleyes:
John Cardinal wrote:
Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work.
Not surprising because the vaporware that is being marketed doesn't really do the work. :doh:
John Cardinal wrote:
Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all.
Talk is cheap. :rolleyes:
John Cardinal wrote:
In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise.
You must admit it makes a good school project. :rolleyes:
John Cardinal wrote:
Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
That is what happens when you buy in to marketing hype. I have learned from bad experiences that if you want to live on the bleeding edge of technology you must be prepared to fail most
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John Cardinal wrote:
I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way.
Last years marketing pitch that is having a hard time finding relevance in this years market direction. :doh:
John Cardinal wrote:
they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months.
This years marketing strategy. :~
John Cardinal wrote:
The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc.
All the bits you need to make a professional application. :rolleyes:
John Cardinal wrote:
Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work.
Not surprising because the vaporware that is being marketed doesn't really do the work. :doh:
John Cardinal wrote:
Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all.
Talk is cheap. :rolleyes:
John Cardinal wrote:
In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise.
You must admit it makes a good school project. :rolleyes:
John Cardinal wrote:
Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
That is what happens when you buy in to marketing hype. I have learned from bad experiences that if you want to live on the bleeding edge of technology you must be prepared to fail most
I wouldn't characterize it as "marketing hype" they truly did believe in what they were doing and were on progress to accomplish it. Something happened along the way, maybe people lost interest at a time when Novell was increasingly getting behind it, I don't know.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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Their
double.TryParse()still throws exceptions... :sigh:**
xacc.ide-0.2.0.75 - now with C# 3.5 support and Navigation Bar!
**
Yikes! I didn't know about that one. All I go by is the enormous list of things that their scanner application shows aren't supported in any one of my commercial .net apps. I've submitted it faithfully over the last year and a half because they are supposedly using those submissions to prioritize their development, but now when I go to their site it's trumpeting silverlight support and other stuff and they make no mention of the same damned simple stuff that has been on my list since day one when I first submitted it. I would help out if I had the skills and the time but I don't so I figured at least I could point out to them where there are areas that need to be completed, but that seems to be falling on deaf ears.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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I wouldn't characterize it as "marketing hype" they truly did believe in what they were doing and were on progress to accomplish it. Something happened along the way, maybe people lost interest at a time when Novell was increasingly getting behind it, I don't know.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
John Cardinal wrote:
I wouldn't characterize it as "marketing hype" they truly did believe in what they were doing
Perhaps "marketing hype" is a bit too cynical. I am definitely jaded and have the scars to prove it. Cross platform implementation is a laudable concept but it keeps getting squashed by different agenda. It is truly the "holy grail" of IT. Hope you didn't go too far out on a limb (with your clients) behind something that you have no control over. It is a good concept but remains elusive because the devil is in the details. What you said about them chasing the new and exciting bits and neglecting the more mundane is typical because people are interested in the latest and greatest technology. Unfortunately, it is the mundane bits that make a product usable. Since it is an open source project perhaps, if you are so inclined, you could devote some time into getting the basics implemented. It may not be glamorous but you will learn a lot along the way.
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
John Cardinal wrote:
I wouldn't characterize it as "marketing hype" they truly did believe in what they were doing
Perhaps "marketing hype" is a bit too cynical. I am definitely jaded and have the scars to prove it. Cross platform implementation is a laudable concept but it keeps getting squashed by different agenda. It is truly the "holy grail" of IT. Hope you didn't go too far out on a limb (with your clients) behind something that you have no control over. It is a good concept but remains elusive because the devil is in the details. What you said about them chasing the new and exciting bits and neglecting the more mundane is typical because people are interested in the latest and greatest technology. Unfortunately, it is the mundane bits that make a product usable. Since it is an open source project perhaps, if you are so inclined, you could devote some time into getting the basics implemented. It may not be glamorous but you will learn a lot along the way.
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
Not to mention them doing the above leaping ahead to get the goodies in Linux, when I researched it last year, they appeared to have lost track with OS X.
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
I'm not even considering evaluating mono for anything exceeding Hello World. :laugh:
Wout
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
I agree completely with your assessment. Marc
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
John Cardinal wrote:
Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work.
<nelson>hA-ha!</nelson> As for the rest of it... Frankly, it doesn't surprise me. .NET is freakin' huge. I just can't imagine too many people sitting down and thinking, "yeah, i'm gonna spend my day going down a list of APIs, writing test cases and implementations based on a spec just in case someone ever wants it." I mean, OSS is all about scratching itches, right? EMACS was RMS's desire for an editor, Linux was Torvalds' desire for a OS to play with, GNOME was... someone's desire to turn the GIMP's UI toolkit into a whole desktop platform... :~ Anyway... i'm thinking it'll take a good few apps with lotsa needs using MONO to motivate its completion. If everyone sticks to graphics demos, no one will ever bother fleshing out Decimal, etc...
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Yes, but can you blame them for doing so if that's the only legal way they can hire programmers they want at the rate they can afford?
-- Nish on sketchy hiring practices
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
I was excited by the potential of Mono but, like you, I'm disappointed in the direction it's taking. Now, if I wanted to go cross-platform, I would look at wxWidgets.
Please visit http://www.readytogiveup.com/ and do something special today. Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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John Cardinal wrote:
Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work.
<nelson>hA-ha!</nelson> As for the rest of it... Frankly, it doesn't surprise me. .NET is freakin' huge. I just can't imagine too many people sitting down and thinking, "yeah, i'm gonna spend my day going down a list of APIs, writing test cases and implementations based on a spec just in case someone ever wants it." I mean, OSS is all about scratching itches, right? EMACS was RMS's desire for an editor, Linux was Torvalds' desire for a OS to play with, GNOME was... someone's desire to turn the GIMP's UI toolkit into a whole desktop platform... :~ Anyway... i'm thinking it'll take a good few apps with lotsa needs using MONO to motivate its completion. If everyone sticks to graphics demos, no one will ever bother fleshing out Decimal, etc...
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Yes, but can you blame them for doing so if that's the only legal way they can hire programmers they want at the rate they can afford?
-- Nish on sketchy hiring practices
Shog9 wrote:
I mean, OSS is all about scratching itches, right?
This is the thing I've always wondered about how some of the more "boring" details of OSS projects get hammered out. And when I do see projects that get polished I really respect the work. Personally though, I can see doing it as a day job or contract but I can't comprehend grinding through re-implementing an existing API for the "fun of it."
My Blog A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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Shog9 wrote:
I mean, OSS is all about scratching itches, right?
This is the thing I've always wondered about how some of the more "boring" details of OSS projects get hammered out. And when I do see projects that get polished I really respect the work. Personally though, I can see doing it as a day job or contract but I can't comprehend grinding through re-implementing an existing API for the "fun of it."
My Blog A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long
Chris Austin wrote:
Personally though, I can see doing it as a day job or contract but I can't comprehend grinding through re-implementing an existing API for the "fun of it."
No, me neither. I predict we'll see a similar outcome to what's happening with Mozilla/Firefox and various web-dev libraries: rather than aping the MS way of doing things, hundreds of little in-house solutions will crop up, the best will rise to the top, and those will be given browser support and a future... as well as shims to let them work on MS systems. So portions of the framework will never be implemented on MONO, but alternatives will be written as-needed and then ported back to .NET. Should be interesting... (that, or it'll all just die a flaming death. hedge hedge hedge...)
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Yes, but can you blame them for doing so if that's the only legal way they can hire programmers they want at the rate they can afford?
-- Nish on sketchy hiring practices
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
Don't they give you source to their framework ? Perhaps they hoped that they'd achieve open source bliss by having users post solutions to simpler problems like Decimal.Round. Either way, I have always viewed the 'Mono rocks' people with suspicion. It seems to me like it will always be like Christian rock music. It's only good for those people who assume that rock music is of the devil, and so need an alternative, and will excuse it, just because it's all they've got.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
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Don't they give you source to their framework ? Perhaps they hoped that they'd achieve open source bliss by having users post solutions to simpler problems like Decimal.Round. Either way, I have always viewed the 'Mono rocks' people with suspicion. It seems to me like it will always be like Christian rock music. It's only good for those people who assume that rock music is of the devil, and so need an alternative, and will excuse it, just because it's all they've got.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
Stryper - great music. Crap lyrics.
Please visit http://www.readytogiveup.com/ and do something special today. Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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I was very excited about MONO for a couple of years there and posted here about it but I'm starting to get the impression it has badly lost it's way. The original concept was to be able to build cross platform .net apps that would run in windows under Microsoft .net or on a mac or linux box etc. So far they have replicated most of .net 2 under mono but for some reason have left out maddeningly basic and important methods like Decimal.Round which is critical for financial software, things like being able to set the cursor to a waitcursor which predates even .net 2. That being said they are now apparently leaping ahead to some .net 3 stuff and promising silverlight support in a couple of months. It has all the hallmarks of a project where everyone is leaping ahead to the fun bits and dropping the ball on the fundamental bits. The other big glaring problem is there is no 3rd party library support worth mentioning, so no reporting, no ui stuff etc. I tried to get Telerik and Infragistics and DevExpress together with MONO, in fact the MONO head dude did get in talks with them. Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work. Although they all seem to use the same fundamentel p/invokes which led the MONO people to say that they would come up with some sort of shim layer to support that which would instantly give everyone using all those nifty 3rd party component libraries the MONO market as well. That never materialized and has since not been mentioned at all. In fact they point people to a list of "MONO" supported .net libraries but there is nothing on there that would work for a serious commercial application developer and besides it breaks the whole point of write once run everywhere that was the original promise. Sadly I think MONO is still years away from being what it was supposed to be this year. Sure you can write trivial little sample apps that run on mono.net and ms.net but try to do anything more and you better write it for MONO and accept it's going to be very limited compared to other apps out there.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
With WINFORM developement PInvoke was common. With .NET3, WPF, there is great hope to reduce PInvoke to naught, making much more portable. It makles sense they rush to .NET3/WPF, here there would be real portability!! I shall hope...
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John Cardinal wrote:
Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work.
<nelson>hA-ha!</nelson> As for the rest of it... Frankly, it doesn't surprise me. .NET is freakin' huge. I just can't imagine too many people sitting down and thinking, "yeah, i'm gonna spend my day going down a list of APIs, writing test cases and implementations based on a spec just in case someone ever wants it." I mean, OSS is all about scratching itches, right? EMACS was RMS's desire for an editor, Linux was Torvalds' desire for a OS to play with, GNOME was... someone's desire to turn the GIMP's UI toolkit into a whole desktop platform... :~ Anyway... i'm thinking it'll take a good few apps with lotsa needs using MONO to motivate its completion. If everyone sticks to graphics demos, no one will ever bother fleshing out Decimal, etc...
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Yes, but can you blame them for doing so if that's the only legal way they can hire programmers they want at the rate they can afford?
-- Nish on sketchy hiring practices
Well technically speaking I'm pretty sure Novell is paying their own developers to work on MONO at this point. It's not a classic OSS project and there is a lot more behind it than fun or hobby, it's a real business case Novell has behind it.
"110%" - it's the new 70%
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Don't they give you source to their framework ? Perhaps they hoped that they'd achieve open source bliss by having users post solutions to simpler problems like Decimal.Round. Either way, I have always viewed the 'Mono rocks' people with suspicion. It seems to me like it will always be like Christian rock music. It's only good for those people who assume that rock music is of the devil, and so need an alternative, and will excuse it, just because it's all they've got.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
The idea of mono truly "rocks". That's not from any kind of culty point of view, strictly a capitalist one (unless of course you feel capitalism is a cult, maybe it is ;) ). If my Visual Studio created .net app contains all the methods that are implemented in MONO I can literally say on my download page of my trial software that the same binary runs on windows and Linux, OSX etc under MONO. Instant market share I didn't have before, nothing to recompile, no separate version to post online, build and maintain etc. It's frustrating because it's close, a lot of simpler apps *do* work that way right now, but for what I do it's not quite there. To be fair decimal.round *is* implemented, just the MidPointRounding attribute isn't supported but that's critical for any financial software. I could contribute to it, anyone can, but I don't have the time.
"110%" - it's the new 70%