Hello Jeff, > However, they're gravitating to C++, at least for their server piece, which > may be a good choice for the lead developer(s) who I think already knows > C++, but may be a sub-optimal choice for the project in general. I fear that > they may be in "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" > mode.
I feel that if your most enthusiastic developers doesn't feel comfortable with a language, there's just little possibilities to keep the enthusiasm high, no matter how good is your proposal. Keep this in mind. > - Do you have good evangelism tactics for Linux developers who evaluate > Mono and find it somehow "un-Unix-like"? Well... if you are conquering a beautiful girl, and she smiles... that doesn't mean that everybody has a beautiful one. They could be married with an ugly, fat girl... with a dog... or with a window. Okay, seriously: A program for ebay services will be for all, including those married with a window frame, they can be buyers, too. Of course, there are other multiplatform options, but none of them has all toghether: easyness, strong-typing OOP, very very rich class framework, language interoperability, remoting, gui, web services, strong web server support, etc. E.g. You could have two linux gurus working on mono, and a bunch of developers on windows. The gurus are not a problem, because they know how to solve all things (in any language), but developers on other platforms won't have to care about cross-platform issues, and minor developers will get productive soon (smooth learning curve). And this is not an evangelism tactic, it's a good reason ;-) > - Is there a technical answer to the "mono my.exe" command-line objection? If someone gets irritated with the ".exe" extension, just crop it and run "mono myprogram". I don't think this is a technical issue, just an anti-ms-ism. Well, but there's a good reason to leave the .exe extension there: That executable is multiplatform, and no changes or recompilation are needed to run it on windows. For ebay apps, surely the majority of the client deployment will be for windows clients. Anyways, if you develop it with C/C++/Pascal/Whatever, you'll have to deal with .exe's, unless you use javascript or any other scripting language. > - Is there an elegant solution for distributing the Mono framework onto > client machines today? Yes, they are currently used: NSIS installer (win), RPM's... For unixes you shouldn't have any trouble, as everybody using it know how to install things. It's more difficult to troubleshoot a binary installer (like kylix) than any other well known thing. Getting back to the first point: If you only have developers for linux and they feel good just with unix-like things, that's your best bet. You could later port the working thing to mono and show them asking for opinion. They'll get convinced when cross-platform problems arise. Regards, Gustavo "Things fall down by its own weight" _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
