Gaining Acceptance?

The other day I attended a webcast on Mono: Running .NET Applications on Linux presented by MSDN.

That’s right – Microsoft giving floor (or rather web) space to Mono.

It was presented as part of MSDN’s Interop month, and the focus of the webcast was – as the title says – running .NET applications on Linux, although he did show some demos going the other way. Although I didn’t really learn anything from the webcast (nor did I expect to) it was nice to see the Mono VB Compiler in action. There was some coverage of using System.Windows.Forms, but it was using the old Wine-based implementation and not the newer (and far more impressive) Managed.Windows.Forms. There’s another one coming up next week – Mono: Interoperating with Linux the Easy Way.

The webcast was given by Joe Hummel who I’ve since exchanged a few emails with about how the next webcast could be improved and possible future ones as well, and he seems like a nice guy.

Virtual On

During the webcast, Joe was running Red Hat 9 within Virtual PC 2004, a setup I’d created myself a few days before – although mine was running Ubuntu of course.

Although it does highlight the inadequacies of my current desktop, it’s a very usable solution (apart from the known colour depth issue) which I’ve since expanded to included a 2nd Ubuntu install which I then upgraded to Hoary. Next I’m planning on adding a Novell Linux Desktop install to the collection.

My virtual adventures were prompted by some posts by Peter Provost on developing in virtual machines. This was an idea I’d been toying with for quite a while and it’s nice to finally put it into action. Eventually I would like to replace the host OS (XP) with Linux, but it’s a matter of finding good-enough, cheap-enough (QEMU vs. VMware) virtualisation software with the added factor of laptop support in the host OS – which of course Linux is notoriously poor for…

Until then, XP & VPC combined are enabling me to do far more than any single OS.

As seen on…

On a semi (Mono) related note, Nat Friedman has published some demos showing Beagle and Mono in action. Very cool, and I may have a go at producing some myself based on the web services I posted about before.