Jeff Dillon

Follow-up to My Mono/.NET comments
There were a few good points in my comments section that I wanted to respond to.

Comment: In Java you couldn't really choose not to write a portable program. Obviously this won't be the case in C#, but it doesn't mean you can't write a portable program.

I agree 100%. But, to me this is similar to how die-hard C and C++ developers say the same thing about C and C++. Yes, it is possible to write portable C++ and yes STL is theoretically very portable. But, it still has all kinds of problems and is harder than Java. Even if something is 95% portable, it is always that last 5% that is the killer.

So, to write a program that cross-platform capable, just avoid the Microsoft.Win32 namespace.

This is exactly what MS tried to do with Java when they first responded to it. "Stay away from com.microsoft.* packages, and you'll be fine". I think people on each side of the fence will never agree on the issue of whether it is more imporant to have a system which favors platform independence or allows you to do everything you need easily. (For example, some people would love to see Java/COM integration.) I have personally dealt with horrible issues resulting from trying to make C and C++ code portable. Unlike Java, .NET is not really focused on portability and therefore Mono may have a tough time. One outcome is that Mono becomes another Wine. Wine is pretty good, works for some things, but is not a real enterprise solution and is always catching up.

Don't get me wrong, Mono is a very cool project and I would like to see it suceed in order to shake things up and compete with MS. My only contention is that it might be a difficult project when your lead developer (MS) does not have a Community process and sees linux as the enemy to Windows.