comparisons of open source .net implementations

[noone]

Posting this in a M$ public forum might attract some hostility but I'll
ask anyway.

I've noted two open source .net projects that will let me develop and
execute somewhat transportable code under linux. www.mono-project.org and
dotgnu.org/pnet both have implementations of the .net framework and c#
bytecode compilers.

Anyone have experience with these suites or know which one of them is more
complete or more stable? A lot of the documentation on those sites seems
more political (touting the virtues of open source) rather than giving
good documentation about the state of the projects or the use of the APIs.

I've written a few network service utilities in c# using mono but want to
do some gui stuff and I want to know which project enjoys better support
and is more stable.

 

[alantolan]

Posting this in a M$ public forum might attract some hostility but I'll
ask anyway.

I've noted two open source .net projects that will let me develop and
execute somewhat transportable code under linux. www.mono-project.org and
dotgnu.org/pnet both have implementations of the .net framework and c#
bytecode compilers.

Anyone have experience with these suites or know which one of them is more
complete or more stable? A lot of the documentation on those sites seems
more political (touting the virtues of open source) rather than giving
good documentation about the state of the projects or the use of the APIs.

I've written a few network service utilities in c# using mono but want to
do some gui stuff and I want to know which project enjoys better support
and is more stable.

Unfortunately, I have nothing useful to answer on comparing the two;
however, I would like to note that the only thing in the posting that
might have engendered any hostility was the first line, the rest seemed
pretty on-topic and reasonable.

Was it really neccessary?

Alan

 

[Greg Young]

Mono is the forerunner. In fact most of the other projects use some of
mono's libraries.

For GUI stuff mono will support GTK#, Tickle#, Winforms (still under dev),
and Cocoa#. GTK# is the most "cross platform friendly" at this point but
winforms once fully supported (check mono's website for more info as to
status) will run on the varying environments as well.

The problem that you will run into is that a mac user won't like your
windows forms UI, so if you are doing heavy cross platform development I
would recommend using a pattern such as MVP or MVC which will allow you to
build multiple interfaces for specific environments which reusing most of
your "interface" code.

Cheers,

Greg Young
MVP - C#
http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung