Laszlo and .NET pt1
My recent Laszlo and .NET post got some great comments, the interest level is at the moment only at the "curious" level but I do think that folks within Laszlo and the .NET community would be willing to start a .NET project. David Tempkin left a comment wondering on my thoughts on a few things so here is my thinking. The server and compiler could be seperate, that would mean that SWF could be created with out the LPS but where does .NET fit into that. Its really about services and your audience.
When a NET development team look at something like RIA and (for example) the LPS they are asking, how can I reuse my exisiting legacy .NET code, APIs and assemblies? How can I reuse my programming skills, while its true that ActionScript is a good match for C#/Java coders its not close to VB.NET and someome who ignores those programmers does so at their peril, lets not forget WinForms can be coded in any CLR language. They are also asking how can I use serialized data, be it from file or from a web service/ADO.NET or remoted. Lastly they are asking, Longhorn is coming, Avalon and Indigo is something we are steering towards, what can a RIA do for me now that I reuse with Longhorn. Much of this thinking is powered by time and money, it costs both to retrain and reskill a team, so anything that goes beyond the standard .NET model (for example winforms or webforms etc) even in big teams (who would have to fight hard to get the budget and prove beyond doubt the ROI) will suffer.
David asked me about compiling to the CLR rather than a SWF and VS integration. Compiling to the CLR from a XML syntax is indeed possible, what this actually would mean is how can I generate a Winform or WebForm interface from a XML syntax. This is of course possible (
Xalmon does this right now with XAML). If VB.NET/C# were usable then the webform/winform could be generated and passed off to the VB.NET/C# compiler. No ActionScript compiler currently exists for .NET, in the longterm it would be best to create one (it could in theory be adapted from the Microsoft or Mono JS compiler) but in the short term it could be compiled to C# and then passed to the C# compiler (2nd stage compilation no one likes but short term would work).
VS.NET has the API to host any compiler, debuggers would be tricker to do but could be done (I would recommend that we use the CLR debugger hooks to create a Laszlo debugger for .NET), we could with time and effort certainly run and debug Laszlo apps in VS.NET.
So there are some summary thoughts, many of the details and thinking still remain.