Whidbey Beta 1 Release coincides with Mono release...

Published 01 July 04 10:36 AM | alexcampbell

I'm not a cynical person.

A cynical person would put some facts together and form them into an idea.  Consider that Microsoft released a bunch of .Net 2.0 beta products only one day before the well published release date of Mono, the open source cross platform framework that works kind of like .Net v1.

So much hype surrounded the .Net 2.0 beta releases that the Mono release nearly went unnoticed around here.  Of course, much of that hype was simply people around http://weblogs.asp.net saying, “I downloaded Whidbey express betas, they're great and so am I”.  With all the new features in Whidbey, none of these people are going to get excited about the features in Mono that we had on .Net 1.0 three years ago.

Anyway, this really just proves my long held view that Mono is always going to be a couple of years behind the Microsoft .Net development cycle and will therefore be pretty useless commercially.  With this release timing coincidence, Microsoft is just pushing Mono further into the darkness.

Comments

# Chad Myers said on June 30, 2004 08:04 PM:

I think you're missing the point of Mono. The point of Mono was not to try to outpace MS with .NET or to compete with it. It was to allow developers to be able to potentially port their code to other platforms. For my company who is writing a business logic layer library for an existing CRM platform, this works very well. We don't have fancy GUIs, just raw data access and pushing bits around.

Mono is not your typical OSS project where the point is mainly to spite MS in some way or another and not really accomplish anything useful.

Miguel de Icaza is one of the few OSS guys who really 'Gets It' (TM) and is not trying to prove anything or make a name for himself or his products.

# Shannon J Hager said on June 30, 2004 08:27 PM:

If by "pretty useless commercially" you mean "there will be less commercials about it on MS blogs", I agree with you. ;)

I think that, for the most part, the commercial viability of a product is completely unrelated to the amount of hype coming from MS-related blogs.

Picture a person/company that is planning on developing a C#-based ASP.NET product with install packages for both Win2k/win2k3 and Linux. Will they forget Mono? Not at all.

Picture any company that is making a commercial product. Which is more useless commerically: a Beta 1 of a hobbyist dev product that runs only on Windows and has a EULA that prevents it from being used commercially or a product that is based on the version of .NET in use today (and for the next 6-12 months) but allows that code to work on Windows, Mac, and Linux?

# JosephCooney said on June 30, 2004 08:37 PM:

IIRR MONO has had generics since before the CTP releases of .NET framework 2.0 were available. Code that anybody can download and hack on means that people can try out new things before Microsoft can get around to organizing a "stable" release. I think MONO is cool, and I salute the efforts of all the developers working on it.

# denny said on June 30, 2004 11:13 PM:

3 years to figure out the stuff that MS did not explain.... and now with .net 2.0 coming the fun begins.....

how much of the .net 1.1 codebase will ms mess with... for .net 2.0 and later to work ms will need to insure that 1.1 apps for the most part will work on a .net 2.0 or later rev.

that means that the radical chnages are done, for the rest of .net it has to be moderate evolutions not revolutions.
so all mono has to do now is maintain status quo.

sounds fine to me....

# Jeff Atwood said on July 1, 2004 02:32 AM:

The reality is that most large companies are only NOW getting up to speed on .NET 1.1. Microsoft can't snap its fingers and have the world migrate to .NET 2.0 overnight.

by the time .NET 2.0 has any serious uptake-- maybe 2006-- I'm sure mono will catch up. As others have pointed out, the hard work of the core language is already done.

In the meantime 1.1 support is awesome, I applaud the effort of making .NET truly cross platform!

# Rodrigo Pineda Icaza said on July 7, 2004 01:42 PM:

I hope you all are not seriously thinking that all good Microsoft wnat us to write aplications that can run on Rival Operating Systems, Do You ?


If you are serious about writing multi OS Fat applications you should be using Java, C++ or C and for Web Apps I recommend PHP, Cold fusion

Microsoft C# is juts a battegorund in Microsoft Mind to direct Developers energy towards Fat Microsoft OS developement.

I persoanlly Think Miguel fell in the I GONNA Follow Category , instead of the I gonna Lead, with the mono initiative , he gave Microsoft the initiative.


Rodrigo