4 ms·

VS is required to develop software that will run on Windows I'm sure the user base of the delightful open source #develop making Windows apps will be sad to he

VS is required to develop software that will run on Windows I'm sure the user base of the delightful open source #develop making Windows apps will be sad to hear this, as will everyone using VS to develop against Mono. Which compilers are part of VS that aren't available elsewhere?

rbanffy 17y ago
Mono is something weird. I confess I fail to understand what drives clever people to hand over the design goals of their open-source project to Microsoft. They are clever people doing an extraordinarily stupid thing. And .NET apps are as much Windows apps as Java or Squeak apps are - they happen to run on Windows and, if you care enough, you may be able to run them elsewhere - and many do. At least until the next broad Microsoft patent-infringment lawsuit. Mono is toxic in that regard - Microsoft may decide to start a FUD campaign anytime they want and Mono just gives them a huge stick. If that's not a dumb thing to do, I am not sure what would qualify. As for the compilers, I am quite sure you cannot obtain any Microsoft compiler that is sold as part of VS without at least some part of VS. You can run them from the command line (if you could call cmd.exe a command-line) and you can download them from Microsoft for free, but saying that they are available "elsewhere" is a bit of an overstatement.
- trezor 17y ago
  You obviously have no idea what you are talking about and if anyone is doing FUD, it would be you. The .NET compilers costs absolutely nothing and are part of the free (as in beer) .NET SDKs you can download whenever you feel like. As for mono: Microsoft has actively supported the community, helped out with getting moonlight (the opensource Silverlight implementation) working, and as part of the Silverlight package you have IronPython, IronRuby and the DLR (dynamic language runtime) which are all largely opensource. Even if Microsoft wanted to bail out at this point, it would be too late. Not to sound rude, but I think you had one thing right in your comment: "Mono is something weird. I confess I fail to understand". How about the simple explanation? The .NET framework (despite the silly name) is a solid framework, C# is a good language, the CLR is sexy and people want to use it on more platforms than just Windows?
  - jksmith 17y ago
    Why do you think that MSFT's current behavior toward mono will continue in perpetuity? If mono ends up negatively affecting profit motive, then MSFT will attack with full force, as it should. If mono doesn't have some security in writing, then mono may be vulnerable - and that's a perfectly fair issue for commercial developers to concern themselves with. There's all kinds of ways to spin the mono future. One might be that, as MSFT realizes the OS is being devalued, let mono become popular, then work a licensing deal after litigation. How is this different from Novell caving in on Suse?
    - trezor 17y ago
      I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves having contributed to mono projects would invalidate any such lawsuit. Also, Microsoft submitted the whole common language infrastructure (CLI), the core of .NET, to ECMA as an open standard. So, unlike most things Adobe and Apple, Microsoft has actually made the .NET infrastructure open, but you don't see people decrying people for wasting their development efforts there. So if that's a perfectly fair question, the FOSS world should immediately start reviewing pretty much all efforts not currently centered around POSIX, OGG and Theora as possibly wasted.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        "I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves having contributed to mono projects would invalidate any such lawsuit" No. It wouldn't. And, most of all, it has no effect on where they take .NET in the future. If they decide to break Mono by moving the reference platform and to make Mono developers run in circles, they can. If they decide to sue _users_ of Mono programs, they pretty much can, unless at least a significant part of the code being used is licensed in a patent-litigation-proof license, which, I gather, is not the case. The whole case is that you just have to trust Microsoft to, for the first time in its history, act in a civilized way. You may judge it's an acceptable risk for you and your users, but I just don't think that way.
        trezor 17y ago
rbanffy 17y ago
You also seem to imply the #develop user base can be compared to the Visual Studio user base. I would like to check your numbers as I suspect the active user #develop-to-Visual Studio ratio is very close to zero. Were VS not a requirement, your number should be above, say, .3?

rbanffy 17y ago

Mono is something weird. I confess I fail to understand what drives clever people to hand over the design goals of their open-source project to Microsoft. They are clever people doing an extraordinarily stupid thing. And .NET apps are as much Windows apps as Java or Squeak apps are - they happen to run on Windows and, if you care enough, you may be able to run them elsewhere - and many do. At least until the next broad Microsoft patent-infringment lawsuit. Mono is toxic in that regard - Microsoft may decide to start a FUD campaign anytime they want and Mono just gives them a huge stick. If that's not a dumb thing to do, I am not sure what would qualify. As for the compilers, I am quite sure you cannot obtain any Microsoft compiler that is sold as part of VS without at least some part of VS. You can run them from the command line (if you could call cmd.exe a command-line) and you can download them from Microsoft for free, but saying that they are available "elsewhere" is a bit of an overstatement.

trezor 17y ago
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about and if anyone is doing FUD, it would be you. The .NET compilers costs absolutely nothing and are part of the free (as in beer) .NET SDKs you can download whenever you feel like. As for mono: Microsoft has actively supported the community, helped out with getting moonlight (the opensource Silverlight implementation) working, and as part of the Silverlight package you have IronPython, IronRuby and the DLR (dynamic language runtime) which are all largely opensource. Even if Microsoft wanted to bail out at this point, it would be too late. Not to sound rude, but I think you had one thing right in your comment: "Mono is something weird. I confess I fail to understand". How about the simple explanation? The .NET framework (despite the silly name) is a solid framework, C# is a good language, the CLR is sexy and people want to use it on more platforms than just Windows?
- jksmith 17y ago
  Why do you think that MSFT's current behavior toward mono will continue in perpetuity? If mono ends up negatively affecting profit motive, then MSFT will attack with full force, as it should. If mono doesn't have some security in writing, then mono may be vulnerable - and that's a perfectly fair issue for commercial developers to concern themselves with. There's all kinds of ways to spin the mono future. One might be that, as MSFT realizes the OS is being devalued, let mono become popular, then work a licensing deal after litigation. How is this different from Novell caving in on Suse?
  - trezor 17y ago
    I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves having contributed to mono projects would invalidate any such lawsuit. Also, Microsoft submitted the whole common language infrastructure (CLI), the core of .NET, to ECMA as an open standard. So, unlike most things Adobe and Apple, Microsoft has actually made the .NET infrastructure open, but you don't see people decrying people for wasting their development efforts there. So if that's a perfectly fair question, the FOSS world should immediately start reviewing pretty much all efforts not currently centered around POSIX, OGG and Theora as possibly wasted.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      "I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves having contributed to mono projects would invalidate any such lawsuit" No. It wouldn't. And, most of all, it has no effect on where they take .NET in the future. If they decide to break Mono by moving the reference platform and to make Mono developers run in circles, they can. If they decide to sue _users_ of Mono programs, they pretty much can, unless at least a significant part of the code being used is licensed in a patent-litigation-proof license, which, I gather, is not the case. The whole case is that you just have to trust Microsoft to, for the first time in its history, act in a civilized way. You may judge it's an acceptable risk for you and your users, but I just don't think that way.
      - trezor 17y ago

rbanffy 17y ago

You also seem to imply the #develop user base can be compared to the Visual Studio user base. I would like to check your numbers as I suspect the active user #develop-to-Visual Studio ratio is very close to zero. Were VS not a requirement, your number should be above, say, .3?