Related link: http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/MonoMeet.html
I got in a little late; I took a 6:45 train out of Kingston and then I
went to the wrong place. But it all worked out in the end, and I
figured out where I needed to be (Residence Inn Boston Cambridge).
The Wi-Fi hotspot here wants 25 cents a minute ($3 for the first 15),
which is completely out of control. I’m trying out the Sony Ericsson
GC82 EDGE card, and I can’t get a signal here (zip code 02142) from
AT&T Wireless. So I’m back to my T-Mobile GPRS, which is working
great (up for an hour and a half at the time of this writing).
10:20 Introducing Mono for Developers
(Miguel de Icaza, CTO, Ximian)
Most of the Mono team is in town, but some of them are not awake
yet…
Goals:
- Improve Linux developer productivity
- Migration from Windows to Linux/Microsoft budget re-use:
training, books, etc :-) - Open Source implementation of .NET
Mono Success Stories
- City of Munich: ASP.NET (350 servers, 150,000 users)
- SourceGear: Vault Software
- Embedded System vendors: embedded Mono/tiny profile
- MonoDeveloper IDE: ported from Windows *fast*
- still compiling more stories
Tidbits
- Java runs on .NET (IKVM)
- OpenOffice (Sun has added .NET Support, so it will “just work” with Mono)
- Mono has been split into two stacks to avoid patent issues:
- Microsoft Compatibility Libraries: ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms
- Mono: Mozilla, MySQL, LDAP, Gnome#, Evolution#, iFolder, etc.
- People who don’t want to deal with it won’t ship the Microsoft Compatibility Libraries
Roadmap
- Mono 1.0: June 2004, supports .NET 1.0 and 1.1, Core, ASP.NET, C# 1.0, etc.
- VM already supports generics, preview of generics to come.
- Mono 1.2: December 2004, adds C# 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, .NET 1.2, XML 2.0
- Further out: Avalon, Indigo
Mono C# is fast
- Mono C# rebuilds itself in 2.5 seconds
- 50,000 lines of code
- Implements C# 1.0
- Self-hosting since January 2002
We also got a demo of the
of
Mono. It’s quite impressive–very nice intellisense support, nice
build support.
Update: Edd Dumbill has written up some more detailed coverage.
Feel free to post a talk back if you have updates, comments, clarification, etc.
Question for you...
I've seen this raised elsewhere without any resolution, so I'll throw it out here too...
Why is the open source community working to make a .Net equivalent for Linux?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my take on it:
My boss and a few other employees are solid MS adherents. Instead of learning and using languages like Java, PHP, perl, etc that can be deployed across different platforms, one of the lead developers is attempting to convert everything over to C# which (obviously) only works on .Net. Not only are we pigeon-holing the systems that we build, but we're also pigeon-holing our skill sets.
Therefore, is the creation of Mono an attempt to make these skills relevant on Linux architectures and/or to open up Linux as a viable architecture to replace .Net infrastructures?
Question for you...
See the bullets under Goals at the top of my article. See also the Mono rationale.