Rocky, Mono and the future of the CLR.
I love reading Rocky Lhotka's blog. You should read it too. Why? Because he's not afraid to call a spade a spade. Well, that, and he loves VB.NET.
Check this out:
"If you read the article you’ll find that the Longhorn OS will seriously change the way that .NET itself is versioned. In fact, it turns out that to a serious degree the whole idea of installing “side-by-side” versions of .NET itself will go away when Longhorn shows up. Oh sure, they have plans for a complex scheme by which assemblies can be categorized into different dependency levels. Some levels can be versioned more easily, while others can only be versioned with the OS itself. What this really means is that .NET is losing its independence from the OS. In the end, we’ll only get new versions of .NET when we get new versions of the OS – and we all know how often that happens… I’d say that this was inevitable, but frankly it was not. Java hasn’t fallen into this trap, and .NET doesn’t need to either. Not that it will be easy to avoid, but the end result of the current train of thought portrayed by Richter is devastating."
I so have to agree: not the future I signed-up for.
I agree with Rocky that there is good news too:
Fortunately there’s the mono project. As .NET becomes more brittle and stagnant due to its binding with Longhorn, we might find that mono on Windows becomes a very compelling story. mono will be able to innovate, change and adapt much faster than the .NET that inspired it.
And That's A Good Thing because, as Rocky so iconclastically puts it
"Hopefully Microsoft will realize what they are doing to themselves before all this comes to pass. Otherwise, I foresee a bright future for mono on Windows."
Personally, I already think there is one. This is just another reason to go learn more about Mono now.