4 ms·

It always seems odd to me that people are excited about .net coming to Linux or osx. Mono has been around for so long I can't remember when it showed up, 2001?

It always seems odd to me that people are excited about .net coming to Linux or osx. Mono has been around for so long I can't remember when it showed up, 2001? As far as I know mono's been feature complete for a decade or more. .net core is neat, but for me it's a tooling thing and not a "we can write .net of Linux" thing

littlecranky67 9y ago
Well, before .net core, Mono never had support for the most important frameworks that were commonly used in .NET world. Namely no support for WPF, EntityFramework, WebAPI, WCF (partial support came later on). This was a dealbreaker for most windows devs. If you accepted this and went for open source alternatives and/or mono's own frameworks (NHibernate, Gtk#, ServiceStack etc.), mono was pretty solid.
westcoastdev 9y ago
mono has been around but was very buggy outside of Xamarin based apps. .net core is a first class .net implementation using lots of the same code code from .net framework and works much better in high stress server workloads.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
Mono has never put a focus on reliability or production-ready code. It's been awesome for desktop software and client applications, but we actually deployed ASP.NET on Mono to unify our deployment environment across our web infrastructure and ran into random bugs and show stoppers on a daily basis. And I'm not just talking about the horrible process of getting Visual Studio projects to deploy to a Mono server, the unavailability of certain APIs, functions that don't quite work the same way, or issues with the Mono frontend server, but also runtime infrastructure issues, random crashes, and more that made it a horrible nightmare worth maintaining two different operating systems for (our reliance on PHP for WordPress and vBulletin (back then, now XenForo instead of vB) meant we faced basically the same .NET-on-Linux issues with PHP-on-Windows, prevented us from going all-Windows at the time). .NET Core is actually cross-platform from the ground up and the .NET Core team considers it blocking issue and won't release if the codebase doesn't run properly and identically on all supported platforms. It's a night-and-day difference.
- martinald 9y ago
  I agree, I've been using mono in semi-production for the best part of a decade for ASP.NET and it's been a complete nightmare every time. It's also a shame that VS for Mac is so half baked for web projects despite MSFTs backing. This issue I have been search for an answer for a while is so obvious I don't understand how they didn't catch it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43967326/visual-studio-mac-cant-run-asp-net-core-project https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43967326/visual-studio-m...
  - scarface74 9y ago
    Luckily there is a better alternative.... https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/
    - dewiz 9y ago
      I love Rider but since they went GA it's super expensive. VS for Mac beta channel is decent, then there's VSCode which is free
      - scarface74 9y ago
        $139 a year or $14 a month for an individual license is "expensive"? On top of that if you buy a yearly license or you pay the monthly license for a year, you get a "perpetual" license. You get to keep the turn current version forever without buying another license.
        martinald 9y ago
        I agree but it is £26/month in the UK (~$35/month), not 14. Where are you getting that price from?
        scarface74 9y ago
        It's the personal license not the business license.
alkonaut 9y ago
I got excited about running mono about 5 minutes every year for the last decade. Each time the enthusiasm came to a complete halt when I actually tried it. Core is in a much better position in terms of completeness, reliability, user friendlyness and not least usage. You always felt like you were the only person trying C# on Linux years ago. Not so now.

littlecranky67 9y ago

Well, before .net core, Mono never had support for the most important frameworks that were commonly used in .NET world. Namely no support for WPF, EntityFramework, WebAPI, WCF (partial support came later on). This was a dealbreaker for most windows devs. If you accepted this and went for open source alternatives and/or mono's own frameworks (NHibernate, Gtk#, ServiceStack etc.), mono was pretty solid.

westcoastdev 9y ago

mono has been around but was very buggy outside of Xamarin based apps. .net core is a first class .net implementation using lots of the same code code from .net framework and works much better in high stress server workloads.

ComputerGuru 9y ago

Mono has never put a focus on reliability or production-ready code. It's been awesome for desktop software and client applications, but we actually deployed ASP.NET on Mono to unify our deployment environment across our web infrastructure and ran into random bugs and show stoppers on a daily basis. And I'm not just talking about the horrible process of getting Visual Studio projects to deploy to a Mono server, the unavailability of certain APIs, functions that don't quite work the same way, or issues with the Mono frontend server, but also runtime infrastructure issues, random crashes, and more that made it a horrible nightmare worth maintaining two different operating systems for (our reliance on PHP for WordPress and vBulletin (back then, now XenForo instead of vB) meant we faced basically the same .NET-on-Linux issues with PHP-on-Windows, prevented us from going all-Windows at the time). .NET Core is actually cross-platform from the ground up and the .NET Core team considers it blocking issue and won't release if the codebase doesn't run properly and identically on all supported platforms. It's a night-and-day difference.

martinald 9y ago
I agree, I've been using mono in semi-production for the best part of a decade for ASP.NET and it's been a complete nightmare every time. It's also a shame that VS for Mac is so half baked for web projects despite MSFTs backing. This issue I have been search for an answer for a while is so obvious I don't understand how they didn't catch it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43967326/visual-studio-mac-cant-run-asp-net-core-project https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43967326/visual-studio-m...
- scarface74 9y ago
  Luckily there is a better alternative.... https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/
  - dewiz 9y ago
    I love Rider but since they went GA it's super expensive. VS for Mac beta channel is decent, then there's VSCode which is free
    - scarface74 9y ago
      $139 a year or $14 a month for an individual license is "expensive"? On top of that if you buy a yearly license or you pay the monthly license for a year, you get a "perpetual" license. You get to keep the turn current version forever without buying another license.
      - martinald 9y ago
        I agree but it is £26/month in the UK (~$35/month), not 14. Where are you getting that price from?
        scarface74 9y ago
        It's the personal license not the business license.

alkonaut 9y ago

I got excited about running mono about 5 minutes every year for the last decade. Each time the enthusiasm came to a complete halt when I actually tried it. Core is in a much better position in terms of completeness, reliability, user friendlyness and not least usage. You always felt like you were the only person trying C# on Linux years ago. Not so now.