Evan Summers's Blog

Interview with Mono's Miguel de Icaza

i was just reading an interview with Miguel de Icaza, creator of Mono.

He mentions their "Mono Migration Analyzer" tool for users to see the coverage for their (Windows) .NET apps. They collect automated reports generated by this tool to see what features of Mono are missing for most real world applications in the wild, and this is used to prioritise Mono development. He mentions they expect to support 50% of current applications with some minor incremental updates, and Novell is staffing up the Mono team for a big push.

Mono 2.0 will support ASP.NET 2.0, but Windows.Forms 2.0 will come later. (When is Mono 2.0 scheduled?)

On the opensourcing of Java, he says Mono is targeting the .NET crowd who are typically not using Java, for migration of .NET apps to Linux, so it doesn't impact them. But naturally it will make Java more ubiquitous in the opensource space.

He suggests that for desktop applications, Java still has to address its memory usage limitations. (Don't other high-level runtimes like .NET and Mono also have relatively high memory usage compared to native C/C++ apps? I thought this was the trade-off for easing development.)

He doesn't seem to like WPF. Although it has some great elements to it, it has some "ugly" ones too, he says. For now they are focussing on Windows.Forms, because people have adopted that in droves, whereas WPF is too new, so not used much yet. (How do these GUI toolkits compare to Swing?)

PS. If Netbeans supported Mono, and automatically converted the uppercase method names to lowercase ones, then i'd give it a try ;) That is, if Windows.Forms compares favourably with Swing?

Comments

• Windows Forms is abysmal. It's extremely basic and primitive. I dont know how the .NET crowd manage with it. We're lucky to have Swing!

  Posted by: benloud on March 26, 2007 at 08:24 AM

• you are right benloud

  I once tried to place a combo box with images over a jtable in c#.net
  i could not do it
  may be my c# is weaker than java but i can do this in java within minutes
  

  Posted by: javaniraj on March 26, 2007 at 09:29 AM

• "That is, if Windows.Forms compares favourably with Swing?"

  Nooooope.... ;-)

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on March 26, 2007 at 09:42 AM

• If your dev platform is Mono, you really, really want to use Gtk# over WinForms. You'd use WinForms only to drag legacy applications over onto the GNU/Linux desktop.

  Posted by: robilad on March 26, 2007 at 10:13 AM

• Never compare an platform independent programming languge with a platform dependent programming tool :)
  Its always nice to read those comments when you keep in mind that .NET is a specialized Windows tool driven by a market oriented company and Java a now opensourced "compile once, run anywhere" programming platform.

  Posted by: alexanderschunk on March 26, 2007 at 10:20 AM

• with the JDK going GPL, i wonder if Mono or Microsoft or someone might use some Java to C# tools to "port" Swing to C#, or create Swing# bindings? ;)

  Posted by: evanx on March 26, 2007 at 10:28 AM

• Swing#? Interesting, I would think that after the JDK goes GPL you will see the GCJ guys making .dll files out of most of the JDK. C# likes to call native dlls so it's not too far fetched to think it could be done.

  Posted by: aberrant on March 26, 2007 at 03:08 PM

• The problem with WinForms is that it feels to much like old Win32/MFC to me. I am pretty sure that many decisions in WinForms were made not to disturb developers too much. Too bad, it could have been much much much better.

  Posted by: gfx on March 26, 2007 at 03:48 PM

• 
  WinForms was never really finished. First it was the long pole in the original .NET 1.0 and 1.1 schedules, so features were drastically cut (doesn't everyone write web applications anyway?). Any they couldn't invest too much in WinForms 2.0, since they were already investing in WPF. Now WPF is out and is only half-baked...but of course Orcas will solve all our problems.

  On the other hand, WinForms doesn't need to be fully functional. Vendors such as DevX and Infragistics provide nice component libraries. And who needs a model when you can bind everything to a DataSet.

  Out of the box, Swing offers a deeper, more useful library (minus a couple of obvious controls), but the third party component libraries are not quite so extensive.

  Both Sun and Microsoft are working on better Application Frameworks (here and here), so building rich clients for Java or just Windows should be easier soon.

  Posted by: tcbinjon on March 31, 2007 at 11:05 PM

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