On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Jeff Lasman <[email protected]> wrote: > I just found this page this morning: > > http://www.microsoft.com/express/product/default.aspx > > and I know a bunch of posters here use Windows and Linux in mixed > environments. > > Does anyone know anything about the "express" products? Are they really > free as in beer, as they appear to look? >
Yes, free beer. They are nice IDEs/compilers. C# is hard to program in without an IDE. That said, you can build applications completely from the command prompt by creating an MSBuild script and using the msbuild.exe, csc.exe together to compile the application. csc.exe and msbuild.exe come with the .NET framework, so you don't even need the IDE just to build. > The pages say they're for .net. I wonder if they'll work with mono? Or > with the .net/mono implementation on Novell SLED. > Work with mono? I don't understand. Mono, and related IDEs are competitive products. They both compile software into assemblies that may be (but due to API differences, probably almost never are) cross platform since they are JIT compiled bytecode. In any event, the VS.NET express comes with the compiler for each variant. > Anyone ever come across these before? Anyone know if they create > programs that work in a linux implementation of Mono? > Ah. Well, it probably depends on whether you restrict yourself to the subset of the .NET framework that mono implements in its version of the .NET framework. I don't think .NET is a good choice for cross platform operation. Java is roughly equivalent to .NET, so if you want cross-platform that's a much more sane path. As long as you're on .NET you're a sharecropper on the MS platform. The caveat is that can be very profitable. -- John.
