As recently found at the above link:
[NOTE: While I have copied the text directly into this post, please visit the above link for a *FANTASTIC* graphic entitled "How CROSS PLATFORM is your .NET?"]
Mono users meeting at the Microsoft PDC.Date: Tuesday September 13th.
Location: Sheraton Downtown LA hotel, a short walk (map) from the Staples Conventions Center.
Time:The meeting will start at 6pm and will go until 9:30pm.
Pass the word to other fellow .NET developers.
At the meeting we will talk about the Mono Project's current state, milestones, new developments, platform support and upcoming releases. Various Mono developers will be there to answer your questions both members of the community and Novell employees working on Mono.
The evening surprise is the unveiling of the new Mono T-Shirts design by Finnish artist Tuomas Kuosmanen. We will be giving out t-shirts to the attendees.
We will showcase some of the Mono-based applications we have built for Linux:
* iFolder file sharing and synchronization,
* the Banshee media player,
* our new photo management software,
* the desktop search,
* the MonoDevelop IDE and
* the GTK# GUI toolkit which is the API we use to create all of these applications.We will also showcase the new vector-based rendering APIs available for developers (completely cross-platform) as well as the new OpenGL-based windowing system.
We will answer your questions on how to bring your .NET applications to Linux, MacOS X and Solaris and how to take advantage of the Mono and Linux-specific APIs.
Finally, we will demo some of the the new Mono software funded by Google's Summer of Code:
* XBuild: the open source msbuild implementation for assisting you in rebuilding your new projects on Mono.
* Ruby.NET and PHP.NET compilers.
* The DIVA Movie editor.
* The new ASP.NET editor.
* The .NET bug finder.
* The Cecil libraries for reading and writing CIL images.
* Mono's XAML compiler.
Wait, do my eyes deceive me?
While I was aware of the XAML compiler because of the *FANTASTIC* work of Gerald Bauer and his XAML-Talk Yahoo! Groups project, I had no idea that Ruby.NET was a part of and as such a result of "Google's Summer of Code."
Excellent!
Say what you want regarding your own feelings on the matter... But the CLI flat out kicks a$$. Adding to this, as the CLI becomes even more deeply embedded into XML via language projects such as COmega, through the watchful eye of Oleg Tkachenko we've recently learned that James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language is "Java's father is skeptical about native XML support" as the post is entitled.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Anybody who has known me for long enough knows that I have always believed that Java's greatest competition doesn't come in the form of an OO-based language such as C# or even the CLI in general. Instead Java's biggest competitor is none other than XML.
"What? Did he just compare Java and XML and suggest they were actually in direct competition with each other?"
Yep, I sure did. And if you really think about it, applying the entire premise that the Java language was founded upon, that of being a cross-platform, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" language [as it was marketed in the early days] and then compare that to the primary purpose of XML: that of being a platform-independent data-interchange format such that any platform, regardless of what languages are natively supported, can have the ability to inter-operate with other systems of a different type, allowing for such platforms to continue forward doing what they were designed to do, taking full advantage of all the OS/Platform and hardware have to offer, by allowing natively compiled binaries to perform just as they were designed; and without compromise due to the need to be "cross-platform."
Take that completely rediculous run-on sentence, using this as a comparison to the write once, run anywhere focus of Java... and you've got yourself some direct competition taking place.
It seems that Mr. Gosling would like a world where we all programmed in his language of choice, which he just so happened to be the creator of. You can't blame him... we're all the same way; we have our language preferences and I can promise you that if I had invented a language that was being used by a good 50% of the software development world, I would probably feel like I was a pretty cool cat, as should he. But unfortunately we don't all feel the same way when it comes to our language of choice. Some language concepts come easier to some and not to other and vice versa. Or maybe its the syntax of one language we prefer over another. But whatever it is, we like what we like and theres not a whole lot that can be said about it.
With this in mind, and the simple fact that the CLI has taken the "Any Language Can Run Here" approach [speaking in terms of a CLI runtime implementation, or CLR, interpreting Common Intermediate Language (CIL) bytecodes, compiled to the aforemention CIL using a compiler capable of emmitting such bytecodes for any particular language of choice.] then with XML's ability to act as a way of intercommunicating between platforms, or even within the CLI Class Library Framework, it gives us the ability to write code the way we want to, using XML as the source format of the data that needs to be processed.
Isn't that what computing is all about? Processing data?
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure I'm not... ;)
Enjoy your .NET "My Language, My Way"-enabled (oh, and because of the Mono Project, completely cross platform-enabled too :) Day!
[UPDATE: Brian Ritchie does a fantastic job of keeping up a list of known .NET-enabled languages for those of you interested in seeing just how many languages, full and partial, have the ability to be compiled to CIL and run via a CLI runtime implementation such as .NET, Mono, and Portable.NET. Also worth noting, for those interested in running Apache on a Windows box while still being able to run ASP.NET-based web-sites, there is the Apache HTTP server cli subproject, A.K.A mod_aspdotnet.]