.NET opened source, the coming death of Mono?



  • http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx

    Microsoft just open source the .NET core and are slowly releasing the core classes on github.

    More libraries. Consider the subset we have today a down-payment on what is to come. Our goal is to open source the entire .NET Core library stack by Build 2015.

    This effectively just headshots alot of work people did into making Mono and replicating M$ own libraries

    Also an MSFT team member also wrote

    That's exactly what it means. And the GC. And the type system. And the assembly loader. And the assembly binder. And the interop system: we'll open source the entire CoreCLR runtime!

    The death of mono does seem to be coming



  • @delfinom said:

    This effectively just headshots alot of work people did into making Mono and replicating M$ own libraries

    Actually, it doesn't. What'll likely happen is that Mono will pull in this stuff and complement it with their own code to take care of the rest, similar to how IcedTea works with the OpenJDK + GNU Classpath code.



  • But why would you want to use the Mono runtime that is lagging behind and just copying what the MSFT runtime does? OpenJDK exists due to licensing issues with non-free software being used in normal Java but the .NET core is MIT License and the rest of .NET (assembler, JIT, etc) is being open sourced as well.



  • I don't see that it kills Mono, I see that it refocuses Mono to use the Microsoft-provided code instead of their homegrown. Their IDE and tooling (integration with open source web servers, etc) is still highly important and needed.

    If the Mono project gets pissy about a HUGE reduction in wasted duplicate-effort, then it's just full of idiots. Being an open source project, I'm sure that's exactly what will happen.

    This is a really good, and really overdue move from Microsoft.



  • This, right after Roslyn, is rather wonderful news. Doubly so if this allows some of the things Mono has been too scared to implement (with good reason) like WPF to become crossplatform.

    Still, what with Windows Runtime apps windowable in Win10 and able to be run on all Win10 platforms... The game I'm making is currently designed as a Windows Store app to take advantage of this later on.

    All I know is, if people manage to build a version of WPF that runs on OpenGL, I might be able to use that instead/as well for my UI. People haven't had a lot of luck hosting Monogame in WPF so far, except through some unholy union with Winforms, and only if there's no overlapping. Fairly worthless. If this means that can change, I will be overjoyed.



  • Their IDE and tooling (integration with open source web servers, etc) is still highly important and needed.

    Considering Visual Studio is written in .NET, who knows, maybe we'll see an official cross platform Visual Studio release in the far future :DDD You don't know how badly I want Visual Studio shell IDEs over Eclipse trash.



  • @delfinom said:

    Considering Visual Studio is written in .NET, who knows, maybe we'll see an official cross platform Visual Studio release in the far future

    That'd be awesome to see, actually! VS runs rings around Eclipse in quite a few ways...



  • According to @cartman82, nobody uses .NET, so who cares?



  • @delfinom said:

    This effectively just headshots alot of work people did into making Mono and replicating M$ own libraries

    Wasn't there a lot of talk about how MS is going to collaborate with Mono? And even if it wasn't for that, that's the stupidest argument ever.

    "Oh no, we put so much work into hacking X to work on Y, and now they're gonna potentially make X actually usable on Y! This cannot be!"


  • ♿ (Parody)

    But it could still piss off people who now feel like they wasted a lot of time and effort.



  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

    For relevance. He may be gone, but Microsoft sometimes still makes some major nods toward this ideal.



  • @boomzilla said:

    But it could still piss off people who now feel like they wasted a lot of time and effort.

    So what? It's normal for things to become obsolete as time progresses. It's like complaining that you spend 20 years mastering the slide rule, and then some guy came with that pocket calculator thingy and made your skills useless. Sorry, no points for you.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    It's like complaining that you spend 20 years mastering the slide rule, and then some guy came with that pocket calculator thingy and made your skills useless

    No, that's a terrible analogy. I'm keeping my points, which I'm tracking on an abacus.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Abacus? Why don't you use a knotted rope like a normal person?



  • @boomzilla said:

    But it could still piss off people who now feel like they wasted a lot of time and effort.

    If people care about their "time and effort" more than they care about getting results, then they're idiots.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Magus said:

    For relevance. He may be gone, but Microsoft sometimes still makes some major nods toward this ideal.

    My cousin used to work in a dev shop where they would play that over the office PA, just for shits and giggles.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    If people care about their "time and effort" more than they care about getting results, then they're idiots.

    Maybe they were making money off of copying .NET. That sounds pretty resulty to me.

    Anyways, I don't think you're an idiot if you're upset about someone wasting your time. In this case, you might ask MS why they didn't do this years ago?

    But we know you're just BSing, otherwise you wouldn't be upset about doing "free" QA for Jeff.



  • I thought Visual Studio was becoming cross platform too



  • A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable for MS. But I imagine they realized that they can make a lot more money selling VS to Linux users than they can by trying to sell them Windows.

    If so, they may get some traction with the non-FSF-zealots. That guy in the office thread and his kind will probably disavow whatever versions of Linux Microsoft first gets it working on.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Abacus? Why don't you use a knotted rope like a normal person?

    💡 rope.... ??

    ... I've been counting stuff with giant rocks... 😦


    Which worked ok because I had good API to interop with COBOL



  • Except that the Standard Edition of VS is now free.



  • @ijij said:

    ... I've been counting stuff with giant rocks...

    Ha, rocks. No one ever needs to count to more than 4. My right hand is more than enough.

    (We'll ignore the fact that you can count to 1024 on one hand...)

    @powerlord said:

    Except that the Standard Edition of VS is now free.

    And yet you really do get more when you buy it. Though it sounds like the free offering is definitely improving.

    However:

    Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
    A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:
    Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
    Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:
    An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
    For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

    if(numDevelopers > 1)
      return Editions.Paid;


  • @Magus said:

    Ha, rocks. No one ever needs to count to more than 4. My right hand is more than enough.

    (We'll ignore the fact that you can count to 1024 on one hand...)

    ... that's where the COBOL API comes in - zoned and packed decimal.

    Rocks good.



  • @ijij said:

    I've been counting stuff with giant rocks

    Do they have holes in them?

    Warning: Following the link above may be hazardous to your sanity (if you have any).



  • @Magus said:

    @powerlord said:
    Except that the Standard Edition of VS is now free.

    And yet you really do get more when you buy it. Though it sounds like the free offering is definitely improving.

    Not that I'll ever buy it as long as work is willing to pay for an MSDN Ultimate license. 😛



  • I bought a Pro license, because my current employer doesn't just give contractors MSDN access. I get Ultimate at work, though.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Their IDE and tooling (integration with open source web servers, etc) is still highly important and needed.

    There is also the Mono implementation of Windows Forms; for people who want to write to that API but still have it run cross-platform, I seriously doubt even now that MS will step in to provide a back end for Qt or GTK or whatever, so there will be that role still to fill too.



  • IDK, the new MSFT is interesting.
    They've integrated a fully functional Android emulator into Visual Studio and it's their own implementation meant to be as fast as possible.You are able to mess with sensor inputs, touch inputs,etc.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/11/12/introducing-visual-studio-s-emulator-for-android.aspx

    There is actually a good chance if MS works on cross platform .NET there absolutely will be GTK, QT support.



  • Back when I was messing with MonoDevelop (before Xamarin uglified it), I seem to remember GTK# working fairly well.



  • @chubertdev said:

    According to @cartman82, nobody uses .NET, so who cares?

    That's exactly what I said. I'm cartman82 and I approve of this message.



  • As for the headline, I think M$'s tactics here is directed towards Xamarin and mobile development. If NET is 100% open source, suddenly they can start globbing up a bunch of multi-platform support code that was done for Mono. I remember some talk that they already started incorporating Mono in the C#/.NET build pipeline.

    Imagine if Visual Studio 16 came with a "C# multi-target mobile app (iOS/Android/WP)" project template. Now that's a true Hail Marry move for WP as a platform. And it just might work.

    I hope it does.


  • BINNED

    @Magus said:

    That guy in the office thread and his kind will probably disavow whatever versions of Linux Microsoft first gets it working on.

    My guess? RHEL or Ubuntu. I'm rooting for Ubuntu since Mint is pretty much 100% compatible with everything Ubuntu (I think I once found somethingorother that didn't work on Mint without fiddling), and Debian is not far behind.

    @EvanED said:

    back end for Qt

    Why would you want that? All hail the Qt master race!

    Ehm, ok, fanboy mode off, I'm probably going to stick to Qt for time being even when it gets ported, but I'm not closed to possibility of trying out .NET if I can count on full functionality on all platforms. Speaking of, does Xamarin work on iOS? Hanzo'd by cartman



  • @cartman82 said:

    true Hail Marry

    Mary's sister?


  • BINNED

    Will the true Hail Mary please stand up?



  • Honestly, people put too much emphasis on "full functionality" - there isn't a whole lot you can't do with mono, and it works on everything.

    Meanwhile, while Cannonical may have the least FSF-approved Linux, Microsoft is better friends with Novell and Red Hat.


  • BINNED

    @Magus said:

    Meanwhile, while Cannonical may have the least FSF-approved Linux, Microsoft is better friends with Novell and Red Hat.

    Oh, I agree there. But it's so damned popular, they might just go shooting for sheer volume of potential users.

    And on the functionality front, I was mostly thinking of Xamarin stuff. Or does that work with Mono? I honestly don't know. Last time I tried Mono I got annoyed with GTK# bit (don't know what exactly, but something irked me), stopped poking around and went off to learn Qt.

    Ironically, I can't stand KDE for some reason.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Imagine if Visual Studio 16 came with a "C# multi-target mobile app (iOS/Android/WP)" project template. Now that's a true Hail Marry move for WP as a platform. And it just might work.

    ...you're aware Visual Studio 2015 (aka VS 14) intends to come with Xamarin Starter, right?



  • Xamarin still calls them "Mono for Android" and "Mono for iOS" as far as I know - they essentially hijacked the project, to everyone's benefit. I'm just mad at what they did to the IDE.

    I think OpenSUSE may even come with Mono installed these days, but installing it isn't terribly difficult on any system at the moment, and is enough to give a fairly high chance of success. My first experience, right after uni with my solar system generator (using OpenTK), the only issue I had was file paths.



  • @Magus said:

    selling VS to Linux users

    Oh god, I can picture the headlines from all those shitty journalists now, loudly proclaiming this as evidence that Microsoft is abandoning Windows.


  • BINNED

    @Magus said:

    I think OpenSUSE may even come with Mono installed these days, but installing it isn't terribly difficult on any system at the moment, and is enough to give a fairly high chance of success.

    I think *buntu and derivatives come with the basic runtime installed as well. Everything else is in the repos. Pretty sure RHEL family hasn't skimped on it either. Except maybe for CentOS (ugh!)



  • @Spencer said:

    Oh god, I can picture the headlines from all those shitty journalists now, loudly proclaiming this as evidence that Microsoft is abandoning Windows.

    I already saw this claim over on OCN. Someone basically said this is evidence that Linux has finally won the OS wars.



  • @powerlord said:

    ...you're aware Visual Studio 2015 (aka VS 14) intends to come with Xamarin Starter, right?

    I am now. There you go. Miguel de Icaza is probably already shaking in his boots.



  • Some journalists assume Office is proof enough that Windows is now low importance. I don't buy it.

    Services may be Microsoft's focus now, but their server and Office have always been more important than Windows.

    But again, I'm really looking forward to what will happen to the Windows Store soon, when it merges. It will be very good for me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cartman82 said:

    a true Hail Marry move

    I was going to make a particular pun on that typo, but then I realized what for you were saying, "marry" is sort of apposite.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Magus said:

    the IDE.

    Speaking of which, did anyone notice, clicking on the Android emulator link, that all the VS screenshots had lower-case menus? That raises the question, did MS fix that themselves in VS12, or did the person who took the screenies do it? :)



  • I believe it was fixed in Update 3, around the same time as they reintroduced the blue color scheme. It is now a checkbox in the options.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Ah, I thought they had merely added the checkbox, not that they turned the caps off for you. I'm still using '12, until about I can get home and download it 6x faster than I can here at work.



  • I'm pretty sure it's still caps by default. It doesn't annoy me, so I've never messed with it.

    I actually have an addon that hides the menu bar entirely unless I press alt.



  • The CoreCLR is a long ways off from the desktop CLR though, Mono'd still fill some needs - CoreCLR is rather a project that dates back to around Silverlight-ish days.



  • @boomzilla said:

    No, that's a terrible analogy. I'm keeping my points, which I'm tracking on an abacus.

    Abacuses are cool. They have a native hexadecimal mode.


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