Getting back to the above topic, one must keep in mind that a Linux distribution is not entirely comparable to Microsoft Windows. Windows consists of the OS and mostly some small (GUI) apps while Linux consists of the Kernel and surrounding core tools and, depending on the distro, lots of contributed packages. How would one go about comparing the two with respect to .NET? Wouldn't a full Linux installation be more comparable to Windows 2003 Server + Office + SQL Server + Exchange etc.?
I would welcome seeing the CLI become a core part of Linux and other operating systems, which would then in turn facilitate the adoption of .NET on the respective platform and the deployment of .NET/Mono based apps. SuSE 10.1b8 is a good step into that direction. On Windows however, as a complement to the previous opinions and observations in this thread, Microsoft is in fact slowly dropping support for .NET. Windows 95 was never officially supported by .NET, and this June Microsoft will drop all Windows 98, 98 SE and Windows ME support, so I am already expecting those operating systems not to be supported by any successor to .NET 2.0. That paradigm was already apparent dropping support for Pocket PC 2002 and Smartphone 2003 with .NET Compact Framework 2.0; similarly WSE only support Windows 2000 and later. While you might argue that many desktop users will have upgraded their OS by now, some customers of my software are actually still running Windows 95 legacy systems, just as I personally do not intend to replace my Pocket PC 2002 anytime soon. So from this perspective "write once, run anywhere" is not only an illusion because of system dependencies a developer might bring in at his/her choice (and I did go through a lot of hassles developing my own platform-independent SOAP stack with TCP binding etc.) but also because the CLI runtimes are only available for a limited number of OS versions. Unfortunately Mono a) does not offer a .NET CF replacement although supporting both ARM processors and Microsoft Windows OS and b) does only support Windows 2000 and later out-of-the-box, with complicated Cygwin compilation instructions for earlier systems. This is already an argument one could make for Linux being a better .NET target platform: => On Linux the user can relatively easy get [the latest version of] Mono using the tools native to his/her distribution while on Windows the user can only run [the latest version of] .NET Framework where Microsoft choose to support it. Andreas _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
