The Sikh Geek

Miguel de Icaza has the low down on the release of Mono 2.0, the Opensource Project to bring .NET to Linux and other platforms. I’ve been following Mono since its inception but for me it was never feature complete enough to do any serious development on. This release has a complete implementation of Winforms (…and thank heavens they dropped their reliance on Wine to achieve that!), rewriting the forms rendering from scratch. They’ve managed to sneak in C# 3.0 and LINQ as well.

The Project Leader, Miguel de Icaza, is the original developer of Gnome which is one of the two main Linux desktop systems used today. He sold his business Ximian to Novell and has since worked for them on Mono.

The road has not been smooth for him as he is a strong advocate of the technical advantages of .NET which has not endeared him to the wider Opensource community. Bringing Microsoft technology to Linux? That’s heresy to many! Worse still he works for Novell, which many in the Opensource Community, feel sold out to Microsoft.

In reality he’s a pragmatist, it’s about getting the best technology to run on the best platforms and to have binary compatibility between them. It’s kind of strange to run a .exe file on Linux. I did a quick test on compiling a simple Winforms app on my OpenSuse 11.0 distro and then took the exe and ran it directly on Vista without a problem.

There’s no WPF and it’s not on the roadmap either, it’s apparently just too hard to implement with their current resources. Unless .NET gets major adoption on Linux then I can’t see this happening anytime soon. However, Silverlight is coming to Linux via the Mono subproject Moonlight and has technical support from Microsoft. In fact Microsoft has recently given its media codecs to Moonlight to port to Linux and Silverlight 2.0 support is on the roadmap. So, whilst you won’t get full WPF support there will be a desktop version of Silverlight to run on Linux as part of Moonlight.

So, this is a good example of Microsoft’s open technology approach around .NET, which is allowing an Opensource implementation of it’s framework.

At the recent Remix UK Conference, Scott Guthrie talked about ASP.NET MVC which is a framework that has been developed based on the Model-View-Controller Paradigm/Pattern. This is a web framework which separates out an online application into a number distinct roles which are as follows :

• Model - provides access to the data which is typically stored in a database
• View - provides the presentation layer which is the web pages that you will see and will provide the styling etc
• Controller - provides the handling of web requests and scheduling the access to the model and view parts

This pattern is not new but what is new is Microsoft’s implementation of this as the ASP.NET MVC. There are a number of advantages of using this approach which are :

• more control over the html generated
• separation into these roles allows a test driven approach i.e. you can test each aspect without having the other parts available
• basic plumbing such as authentication is built in

Whilst this might not be the right approach in all scenarios it gives a great new option which is free and for us gives us a framework where something like Sharepoint is not required. ASP.NET MVC is also supported by Microsoft in a production environment.

Here are some great FREE resources for software development from Microsoft

Event : Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.x - 3 day instructor led course from 19-21 February. Check out the Partner Portal for more info. You’ll probably get waitlisted for it and you have to be a Certified Partner but worth a go anyway as it’s zero cost.

Free eBooks on LinQ, ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight. Check out this blog post for the details.

Yep, it’s FREE and no need to register for this 3-day Virtual WPF Bootcamp. Everything you need to learn about developing in Windows Presentation Foundation. Dust off the Visual Studio 2005 Standard Ed discs you got in the Action Pack and put it to some good use. Great idea by Microsoft and I’m looking forward to other sessions on Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.0. Now if only I had any designs skills

I was at the MSDN Event in Birmingham this afternoon entitled “Overview of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5″ presented by Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty of the Microsoft Developer Group. I was really glad I went because it convinced me that I should start using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Daniel did a good job of convincing me that VS 2008 was a true superset of VS 2005 and as the CLR has stayed the same from Framework 2.0 -> 3.0 -> 3.5 then there’s no great problem. Framework 3.5 is a superset of the preceeding Frameworks. The headline feature in .NET 3.5 is the new language construct called LINQ (Language Integrated Query). Think of it as a SQL like syntax for working with all sorts different data types, be they objects, datasets or databases. This really shows the power of the .NET runtime, that such new language constructs can be developed without any changes in the underlying CLR. So, you’re just getting the compiler to do some clever stuff for you and produce the appropriate IL.

What you get in VS 2008 is a really productive environment with intellisense and they’ve added the Expression Web editors for CSS support. Having been using Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer 2007 recently, these are really great tools. Also, VS 2008 has extensions for doing things like Sharepoint Workflow, Office Business Applications, etc all built in. Also, it’s got new Visual designer for WPF, so it you’re wanting to do Vista based development then this is the tool of choice.

Right, I’m off to download VS 2008 Beta 2 and Framework 3.5 from my MSDN Subscription…

This ONLamp Article gives a great overview of Mono which is an implementation of .NET on Linux and the Mono guys have also been working hard on getting Silverlight working for Linux as well with some good progress.

After all the negative karma around recently, here is a more positive story. Miguel de Icaza, of the Mono Project, has been down at Microsoft at a compiler lab meeting and being taken out to dinner by Scott Guthrie. You see, get a couple of techies in a room and they’ll quite happily work together, it’s the execs that get in the way! Scott mentions the meeting and dinner on his blog.

Looks like Miguel has started on the evaluation of being able to do Silverlight on Mono as well.

The Atlas Toolkit is a cool framework which is essentially Microsoft’s AJAX framework. AJAX is the hot topic at the moment and is a way in which browsers can give a much more user rich experience. Have a play around with the samples on the Atlas Toolkit website. It’s amazing the effects and animations that you can get.