Saturday, July 28, 2018
Mono a look forward
Mono a look forward
Update:
I created a Mono wiki so that the community can keep mono documentation updated. Please visit and help out if you can!
I came across this article by Edd Dumbill while searching for a Mono question I had. Usually when you read impressions from people on the web, theyre either anti-Microsoft programmers who despise Mono for its association with .NET or theyre from journalists who havent researched the Mono platform for very long. Edd Dumbill is unique in that hes not overly biased and hes knowledgeable enough of Mono to have written one of the few books on Mono development. Hes a Mono supporter, yet his article is blindingly positive. In fact, he gives a very thorough, balanced overview of where Mono is (or was, in Aug. 2007) and whats holding it back.
He comments that Mono excitement may have peaked around October 2004 just months after its 1.0 release. Thats nearly three and a half years ago. Sadly, I think hes right. However, thats not to say Monos proverbial best day are behind it. I think 2008 will bring a resurgence to Mono awareness and chatter. This year, Mono plans on releasing 2.0 with full support for .NET 2.0 including Windows Forms. In March (maybe), Mono 1.9 will come out with C# 3.0 language support, including LINQ, and the ability to use the DLR with Mono. Silverlight 2 is garnering a lot of hype and if Moonlight can keep up and release 1.0 soon after (Im not sure that it can, but MS is helping), it will be a major boost to the entire platform. Ive been hearing good things about Mono used for embedded programming in gaming and hardware devices. Hopefully, Novell can recognize this market and do something with it.
Lastly, I have a few gripes about Mono. Edd states theres good documentation out there. I completely disagree. There main page has not changed in 2 years according to archive.org. We saw the enormous disaster that resulted from poor site design. Most pages are terribly out of date and unorganized. It would be nice if each page had a "Last modified on:
If I understand correctly, there are up to 3 diff compilers.
*mcs - .NET 1.1
*gmcs - .NET 2.0
*smcs - for Moonlight
Thats an awful lot for developers to understand, especially since all they probably need is gmcs and they get confused when its not the default compiler. I think I read the two will finally be combined in the 2.0 release, but Im guessing that wont be until Fall 2008. Edit: I forgot to mention this, but the versioning was pretty terrible and Im glad theyve fixed this (have they?). 1.2.6 has C# 3.0 features, in fact!
The release notes and Mono API listings are on a different domain (go-mono.com) than the main page. Huh? I really do hope the Mono website gets a facelift and a restructuring once 2.0 comes out.
See this call to action by Kevin Shokey about improving the build process for Mono.
Also, this 2006 review of MonoDevelop. Documentation is still severely lacking 2 years later.
Well, Im not sure if anything constructive came out of this post, but I needed to get this out. Ill see if I can put up a wiki with some nice documentation for getting started with mono.
