3 ms·

As a .NET developer, and lover of all things C#, I couldn't be more happy. There's always been that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I'm pigeonholed

by mdip 10y ago

As a .NET developer, and lover of all things C#, I couldn't be more happy. There's always been that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I'm pigeonholed with a language I can't easily use on other platforms (Mono's been around for a while and I've used it but I ran into a variety of problems the last time I targeted it[1]). "Officially" supporting alternative platforms gives me the opportunity to write code in a language I prefer for the handful of Linux boxen I've had here. I'm looking forward to poking around with this in NetBSD. I've had a box doing virtually nothing here for a while running an old version -- guess it's time to upgrade! The thing that still makes me hang on to other languages is uptake. I haven't looked in a little while, but back when Mono was "it", the number of applications available outside of Windows was pretty small. Basing an application on Mono tended to come with grief lobbed at the developer[2]. Has any of that changed or shown signs of changing since CoreCLR was released? [1] I'll be the first to admit that these problems had workarounds I wasn't familiar with at the time and though I had no similar problems with a handful of CoreCLR apps I've written, I was far more researched at my second attempt and would have probably been successful with either had I bothered to try. [2] I tried to find examples - my memory is not serving me well but I thought a component of OpenSUSE or something along those lines was written targeting Mono and was later scrapped for another technology due to weak community support. The best example of complaints I could find is http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mono-a-gratuitous-risk-the-free-software-column http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mono-a-gratuitous-risk-t...

tracker1 10y ago
IIRC there was a note taking app that was included with Ubuntu for a while. It was mainly removed to save the disk space (the target at the time was CD size), but there was a lot of negative feedback about it at the time. Some of the negative feedback was deserved, but I think most of it was FUD. I tried to run Mono for some things earlier on, and it was just a lot of effort for things that worked so well in Windows at the time. I think the CoreCLR work and acquiring Xamarin definitely show some work in the right direction here. I've been doing mostly node.js dev for the past few years, may consider .Net again... tbh, more interested in looking at Go for something though, as an excuse to learn. I do miss some niceties with VS though.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  It wasn't just the note taking app. There was nearly a half-dozen mono-based applications included out of the box on Ubuntu in one brief "mono spring" in Ubuntu before the hate hit. A particularly good example, I think, was the music app Banshee, which I thought was a much better application than what it replaced and what in turn replaced it in the Ubuntu default install. Another example from that time was F-Spot, a photo library tool. Apps built specifically for Mono, most of which were directly using Gnome's Gtk UI library (via the Gtk# bindings) were great apps. A lot of the hate really was just anti-Microsoft (and/or anti-Novell at the time) FUD. The fact that Mono had an on disk footprint about as much as Python was the useful tool in what was mostly (from my perspective) a useless debate.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I had forgotten about the number of apps, I just remember the postit-note style app in particular. I agree, it was mostly anti-ms fud... but it was still close enough to some really questionable motions by MS that they deserved some of that criticism. I was pretty big into C# at that point, and really liked the work being done. I was mostly doing web apps (still am) and that story wasn't nearly as good as the desktop side of things. I still feel that C# is a really great language, and the bindings to native methods from managed code are still the best I've worked with... far better than JNI and other tooling. Probably why it was such a great fit, and why GTK# works so well. I never bought the "but microsoft will always be ahead" argument, as the gtk apps that worked under mono wouldn't magically stop working because .Net kept moving forward.
  - shirro 10y ago
    There was a lot of concern over patents and control but I think the decline of Mono had a lot more to do with Novell going bust and developers disappearing. Vala was an attempt to provide enough c# like features to provide an alternative and while it hasn't exploded in popularity it probably has filled the gap to some extent.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago

by mdip 10y ago

tracker1 10y ago

IIRC there was a note taking app that was included with Ubuntu for a while. It was mainly removed to save the disk space (the target at the time was CD size), but there was a lot of negative feedback about it at the time. Some of the negative feedback was deserved, but I think most of it was FUD. I tried to run Mono for some things earlier on, and it was just a lot of effort for things that worked so well in Windows at the time. I think the CoreCLR work and acquiring Xamarin definitely show some work in the right direction here. I've been doing mostly node.js dev for the past few years, may consider .Net again... tbh, more interested in looking at Go for something though, as an excuse to learn. I do miss some niceties with VS though.

WorldMaker 10y ago
It wasn't just the note taking app. There was nearly a half-dozen mono-based applications included out of the box on Ubuntu in one brief "mono spring" in Ubuntu before the hate hit. A particularly good example, I think, was the music app Banshee, which I thought was a much better application than what it replaced and what in turn replaced it in the Ubuntu default install. Another example from that time was F-Spot, a photo library tool. Apps built specifically for Mono, most of which were directly using Gnome's Gtk UI library (via the Gtk# bindings) were great apps. A lot of the hate really was just anti-Microsoft (and/or anti-Novell at the time) FUD. The fact that Mono had an on disk footprint about as much as Python was the useful tool in what was mostly (from my perspective) a useless debate.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I had forgotten about the number of apps, I just remember the postit-note style app in particular. I agree, it was mostly anti-ms fud... but it was still close enough to some really questionable motions by MS that they deserved some of that criticism. I was pretty big into C# at that point, and really liked the work being done. I was mostly doing web apps (still am) and that story wasn't nearly as good as the desktop side of things. I still feel that C# is a really great language, and the bindings to native methods from managed code are still the best I've worked with... far better than JNI and other tooling. Probably why it was such a great fit, and why GTK# works so well. I never bought the "but microsoft will always be ahead" argument, as the gtk apps that worked under mono wouldn't magically stop working because .Net kept moving forward.
- shirro 10y ago
  There was a lot of concern over patents and control but I think the decline of Mono had a lot more to do with Novell going bust and developers disappearing. Vala was an attempt to provide enough c# like features to provide an alternative and while it hasn't exploded in popularity it probably has filled the gap to some extent.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago