Archive for February, 2005

“This is your receipt for your husband… and this is my receipt for your receipt” 0

Posted February 2, 2005

Yesterday, Joe Hummel gave a great presentation of Mono to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN*).

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Joe Hummel demos Mono to an MSDN audience

Joe built a quick hello world executable on Linux with Mono 1.05 (he was using RedHat 9 in Virtual PC 2004) and showed it working on Linux and Windows. Then he showed some really great little Windows.Forms applications (built in VS.NET) running on Linux with Mono without recompilation. We were on the edge of our seats as he ran applications using the Mono 1.05 VB.NET runtime and Windows.Forms implementation (since then completely rewritten), something few of us would have dared do. It worked without as much as a hickup.

Worth noting for those who have watched the Microsoft sponsored Webcast that:

  • Mono is not a port of .NET, it’s an implementation of the ECMA CLR & C# specifications and the .NET APIs
  • Mono works on Linux (x86, x86_64, PPC, PPC 64, S390, S390x), MacOS X, Solaris, Windows NT, Windows XP and a variety of other platforms.
  • Our System.Windows.Forms implementation has been rewritten from scratch and does not rely on Wine anymore. “All controls are natively drawn through System.Drawing. MWF implements it’s own driver interface to communicate with the host OS …”
  • One should now use the “unstable” releases (1.1.x) when evaluating Mono, we’ve made a lot of progress, fixed a lot of bugs and optimized greatly since Mono 1.0 in June 2004. Also, we’re getting close to releasing Mono 1.2 (Early Q2 2005) so 1.1.x is where it’s at, right now.

So all in all, it was great to hear praises of Mono in a Microsoft sponsored event, many thanks to Joe. More Mono action with MSDN on Feb 8th.

(*) The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) is an information service from Microsoft for software developers.

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