Mono Project Presentation
Last week's BayNet User Group's presentation of the Mono Project by Christian Gross revealed some unexpected information--at least for me. First, let me say that the presentation was great, and the scope of a project like this is huge. Even running a console "Hello World" application on both a Windows platform and on Linux is impressive.
What I didn't realize is that the goal of the project isn't necessarily 100% compatibility. As I understand, the primary goal is to provide a better development environment for Linux; specifically, C# and the underlying framework. While a great deal of the code can be run from IL on either platform, it appears unlikely that complex WinForm applications developed for Windows will run on the Linux platform. It was pointed out that most everything developed for Linux would run on Windows, and that ASP.NET (for the most part) was compatible on both platforms.
My hope is that at some point ISPs will be able to offer ASP.NET hosting on inexpensive Linux servers using Apache--and that as ASP.NET developers we won't have to worry about the underlying platform.