Ben Martens wrote:

> This is great.  Thank you for all the advice (and I'm always open to more!)
> I just wanted to address the .NET question...
>
> Chris wrote:
> >> .NET? Cross Platform? I didn't think these could be held in the same
> thought.
>
> .NET, contrary to what the anti-Microsoft press would lead you to believe,
> IS very cross platform.  That is the beauty of it.  I'm still learning about
> it, but basically you can write in any language.

Well....
Yes and no.

Yes, the language of .NET is supposed to be cross-platform. The exact same way
the OS of WindowsNT/2K/XP is supposed to be cross-chip. Of course, how many
chips is XP shipping for? Alpha? PowerPC?...

And the same way that NT 3.5 and NT 4 had pluggable filesystem support. But how
long was it before Microsoft added a FAT32 pluggable filesystem for cross-OS
support? Can you say "never" boys and girls?

Anyway, the language is cross-platform, but the key libraries are not. That's a
gotcha to keep your eyes on. Even if someone else clones them, you still have
compatiblity issues like with WINE.


from http://java.oreilly.com/news/farley_0800.html

> Portability: The .NET core works on Windows only but theoretically supports
> development in many languages (once sub-/supersets of these languages have
> been defined and IL compilers have been created for them). Also, Net's SOAP
> capabilities will allow components on other platforms to exchange data messages
> with .NET components. While a few of the elements in .NET, such as SOAP and
> its discovery and lookup protocols, are provided as public specifications, the core
> components of the framework (IL runtime environment, ASP+ internals, Win
> Forms and Web Forms component "contracts", etc.) are kept by Microsoft, and
> Microsoft will be the only provider of complete .NET development and runtime
> environments. There has already been some pressure by the development
> community for Microsoft to open up these specifications, but this would be
> counter to Microsoft's standard practices.
>

But if you look at it as a replacement for working with COM/ActiveX (although
it really is just the next extension of those) and with VisualBasic, then it
seems like a huge stride in a better direction.

On Project Mono, the Linux effort, they mention that they're not interested in
much more than the development infrastructure part, and "We're not interested
in Passport or SQL"...

I think somewhere in summer they expect to have an initial cut with GUI stuff
working.

Oh, and from the Mono FAQ:


> Question 20: What is a 100% .NET application?
>
> A `100% .NET application' is one that only uses the APIs defined under the
> System namespace and does not use PInvoke. These applications would in
> theory run unmodified on Windows, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, MacOS X and others.
>
--
Jon A. Cruz
http://www.geocities.com/joncruz/action.html

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