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There's been a lot of talk on the #Develop mono port list about the difficulties of porting #Develop because of the use of System.Windows.Forms and IE. It's reminded me how far away Mono is from being suitable for writing portable GUI applications, with #Develop looking at porting SWT from Java, which I know nothing about but since I am going to have to learn now I hope it's as good as it's said. The big problem with Mono is that in order to get a 100% complete (without the forms designer code that's in the Windows implementation) version of SWF they have to use Wine. This is all well and good, but if you've got Wine there installed providing Win32 calls then why do you need .NET? The only answer is that we need GTK# (which I don't like), SWT or something to be implemented and then people need to move away from SWF. This is of course never going to happen for most applications, especially those from Microsoft.
The fundamental problem is that .NET is a lot bigger than it looks, and Mono doesn't support a of a lot of it yet. They implemented their own debugging API instead of the Microsoft one so that you're going to need a serperate debugger and profiler whereas the Microsoft way with Rotor is just a recompile and using LoadLibrary instead of CoCreateInstance to create the ICorDebug interface. As far as I'm aware only two applications use the forms designer built into SWF so Mono is never going to support that. I know they're both things that directly effect only #Develop, but it really shows the differences between the two platforms to me. On top of that Mono is always going to be a version behind anyway, so I'm really loosing any optimism for the project being any more than useful for people like me (and probably anybody reading this). Cross platform .NET for the mainstream is still so far away as to be not worth worrying about yet. For developers it's here today as long as you only code for Mono and then run it on the Microsoft CLR as well.
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4:39:21 PM 
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Actually I hate Radio. The news page stopped working yesterday, and although it's come back now it annoyed me enough to accelerate my look for a replacement. When it comes down to it a weblog is a pretty simple beast, so I don't know why Radio has so much trouble. For various reasons I want to host my weblog on my own server still, and so on the look out for an ASP.NET solution that I can install.
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4:20:26 PM
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