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%
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%
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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%
Yeah... Any idea what projects Novell is using it for? I know they had some sort of WebDAV / Sharepoint-ish thing at one time, but haven't paid much attention lately.
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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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Yeah... Any idea what projects Novell is using it for? I know they had some sort of WebDAV / Sharepoint-ish thing at one time, but haven't paid much attention lately.
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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
Not sure, but I think it's more an overall bigger picture thing they have going on with their own linux distro etc. I've always assumed they are trying to get more commercial apps that can run on Linux, this is one way to do that.
"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%
-
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%
Just some thought: I would rather the mono team selectively implement features grouped by functional areas, instead of what they are currently doing; building a wireframe of the entire fx and then fill the holes later. For instance, they can completely unsupport Asp.Net, yet, allocate their full resources to implement a solid WindowsForm areas, or the other way around. .NET is a framework, application built with it will inherit any bugs and design issues. A framework may not neccessary be features-rich, but it must be solid. The ultimate goal of Mono is to be able to run .net application on other platform, and that people will actually use mono for that. What the team doing now is completely opposing this goal. If support for a particular OS is blocking the project, drop that OS support; If certain UI components are just very hard to be implemented in cross-platform, exclude such components completely until a better solution comes up, or leave that area to third party. The last thing I want is to have halfly implemented code as the foundation of my project. The moment I know they are going to support .NET 3.X at this very point make me shrink my head. When mono isn't yet fully supporting .NET 1 to .NET 2, why bother .NET 3? They are just wasting their time. The big company behide the project is just wasting money.
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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%
Yup - I agree. I didn't need too much of the .NET stuff, just enough to have a fairly streamlined GUI to control and display results from some image processing functions I write in my job... mono was going to be a nice way for me to keep the simplicity of "knocking up a GUI" while allowing me to be cross platform (I'm more a Linux than a windows developer). I tried for a few days to get something usable written... it just wasn't straight forward, and .NET is just so much more easier to knock up quick and dirty demo's that have a polished feel and run fairly quickly. I love SharpDevelop though... I found MonoDevelop (or whatever they call it) just isn't as stable.
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JimmyRopes wrote:
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.
I agree with you !!!
Greets! Joel
You got my vote on that too. The true nature of Open Source is that if it's broken, *YOU* can fix it. So get your tool belt on and start hammering.
------------------------- Neil Cowburn Principal Partner OpenNETCF Consulting, LLC -------------------------
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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%
"Turned out that most ".net" libraries on the market make heavy use of P/Invokes to work." Actually, the .NET Framework makes heavy of P/Invoke too. Are you going to slam that too while your on a roll?
------------------------- Neil Cowburn Principal Partner OpenNETCF Consulting, LLC -------------------------
-
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:
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...
Why don't you just derive a Decimal subclass and overload the Round() method? It sounds easy enough to me but I don't know the situation...
############################################# A comment from some code: "The devision operations in the SET function calls are intentional, do not change them, they will prevent a software bug from causing the robot to drive through twelve cubical walls"