Is Mono serious? Is Mono still alive?

[cmdematos]

I don't want to stir up a hornets nest. It is my intent to see Mono as a strong enough offering to be able to recommend medium to large companies to commit to an Open technology stack that includes (and relies on) Mono. Forgive me if I am not well informed, I am definitely well intended.

The following are issues that stop this from reaching any sort of reality:
1) There is no visible Mono timeline and release plan. What is Mono's intent and stated goals for the future? Will it try to maintain parity with Microsoft Dot.Net to some level, and if so what level and by what time-line?
  1.1) What are mono's resources?
  1.2) Who are mono's sponsors?
  1.3) Are we resourcing up to maintain pace with our plans?

2) Many projects that should be enablers of achieving a reasonably parity with Microsoft Dot.Net have not been updated since Dec 2008 (such as Olive) If these are no longer strategic the thinking behind this should be made transparent.

3) The mono site has a mix of outdated pages statuses and some (very little) new content. I agree that the code is more important than the site, but it is less than professional to not date each page edit and structure the site so that the latest status and pages are always guaranteed to be clear and navigable. Please fix this.

4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a snow-balls hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a thought. I suggest that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it wont slow down Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.

Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?

[Jonathan Pobst]

cmdematos wrote:

> I don't want to stir up a hornets nest. It is my intent to see Mono as a
> strong enough offering to be able to recommend medium to large companies to
> commit to an Open technology stack that includes (and relies on) Mono.
> Forgive me if I am not well informed, I am definitely well intended.
>
> The following are issues that stop this from reaching any sort of reality:
> 1) There is no visible Mono timeline and release plan. What is Mono's intent
> and stated goals for the future? Will it try to maintain parity with
> Microsoft Dot.Net to some level, and if so what level and by what time-line?
>   1.1) What are mono's resources?
>   1.2) Who are mono's sponsors?
>   1.3) Are we resourcing up to maintain pace with our plans?

Mono's roadmap is available here: http://www.mono-project.com/Roadmap

In general, Mono is currently aiming to maintain parity with .Net 3.5
SP1, minus WPF and WF.

This means Mono currently supports:
- System.Core
- LINQ
- C# 3.0
- Some WCF

on top of almost everything in .Net 1.1/2.0.

We will continue working on filling in any remaining gaps in our .Net
3.5 coverage.

> 2) Many projects that should be enablers of achieving a reasonably parity
> with Microsoft Dot.Net have not been updated since Dec 2008 (such as Olive)
> If these are no longer strategic the thinking behind this should be made
> transparent.

> 3) The mono site has a mix of outdated pages statuses and some (very little)
> new content. I agree that the code is more important than the site, but it
> is less than professional to not date each page edit and structure the site
> so that the latest status and pages are always guaranteed to be clear and
> navigable. Please fix this.

Yes, our website is sadly out of date.

> 4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and
> the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not
> implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and
> concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE
> infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a snow-balls
> hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a thought. I suggest
> that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it wont slow down
> Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.

MonoDevelop is already a very mature IDE (code completion, refactoring,
gtk designer, visual debugging, etc.).  Throwing it all away and
starting from scratch on integrating into an existing IDE would probably
set us back a couple of years to regain feature parity with what we have
now.

MonoDevelop is also a great application for dogfooding Mono and GTK#, so
we can find and fix issues.

Jonathan
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[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > 4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and
> > the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not
> > implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and
> > concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE
> > infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a snow-balls
> > hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a thought. I suggest
> > that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it wont slow down
> > Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.
> MonoDevelop is already a very mature IDE (code completion, refactoring,
> gtk designer, visual debugging, etc.).

Ditto,  MD is a excellent, fast, and stable.   I develop in both Python
and C# in MD and it is a great pleasure to work with/in

> MonoDevelop is also a great application for dogfooding Mono and GTK#, so
> we can find and fix issues.

Also I'd imagine building a .NET Gtk# designer in a Java IDE might not
be a bucket of fun.
--
openSUSE <http://www.opensuse.org/en/>
Linux for human beings who need to get things done.

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[Stifu ()]

Mono is alive and kicking. Other than the number of posts here and on monologue (http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/), which clearly shows Mono is nowhere near dead (unlike, say, dotGNU), the gap between Mono 2.0 (last year) and Mono 2.6 speaks volume about how fast things are moving.

1) I take it you saw roadmap? http://mono-project.com/Roadmap
As far as I know, other than WPF, pretty much everything in .NET is planned for implementation in Mono.
The class status page (http://go-mono.com/status/) is also interesting, although it doesn't tell you about future goals.
I believe Miguel said about a dozen of Novell devs worked on Mono (+ contributors), I don't know much other than that.

2-3) I agree about the lack of updated content / documentation... I believe Olive (or part of it?) was merged with the main Mono branch at some point, but I don't know the details.

4) I'd pick MonoDevelop over Eclipse, personally. Although less mature, MonoDevelop is lighter and faster, and has just the features I need. It just needs to be polished some more (stability improvements, bugs fixing, OS parity by, for example, adding debugger support for everything on every OS...). MonoDevelop has been worked on for years, and with the relatively recent additions of debugging + Windows and OSX support, I guess the bulk of the work has already been done. If MonoDevelop had only just been started, I may agree with you, but MonoDevelop is there right now and already works fine.
That said, that doesn't prevent Eclipse-enthusiasts from looking into Mono with Eclipse, but I don't think Novell should bother at this point.

All of that said, few companies use (or even know about) Mono... which is a shame. Hope that ends up changing.

cmdematos wrote:

I don't want to stir up a hornets nest. It is my intent to see Mono as a strong enough offering to be able to recommend medium to large companies to commit to an Open technology stack that includes (and relies on) Mono. Forgive me if I am not well informed, I am definitely well intended.

The following are issues that stop this from reaching any sort of reality:
1) There is no visible Mono timeline and release plan. What is Mono's intent and stated goals for the future? Will it try to maintain parity with Microsoft Dot.Net to some level, and if so what level and by what time-line?
  1.1) What are mono's resources?
  1.2) Who are mono's sponsors?
  1.3) Are we resourcing up to maintain pace with our plans?

2) Many projects that should be enablers of achieving a reasonably parity with Microsoft Dot.Net have not been updated since Dec 2008 (such as Olive) If these are no longer strategic the thinking behind this should be made transparent.

3) The mono site has a mix of outdated pages statuses and some (very little) new content. I agree that the code is more important than the site, but it is less than professional to not date each page edit and structure the site so that the latest status and pages are always guaranteed to be clear and navigable. Please fix this.

4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a snow-balls hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a thought. I suggest that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it wont slow down Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.

Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?

[Mike Christensen]

A few comments:

 

First, I think Mono is a fantastic platform that's making huge advances with each release.  However, it simply doesn't compare with Microsoft .NET.  The .NET Framework has hundreds of people working on it, a near unlimited budget, and is the obvious choice for running .NET code.  It has one of the most advanced garbage collectors ever written, has a huge arsonal of profilers, code coverage tools, debuggers, third party frameworks, etc.  The way I see it, the .NET name is associated with Microsoft and Microsoft has somewhat of a bad rep in the open source community.  For this reason, those who have made the decision to go open source most likely already steer away from Microsoft based technologies.  Companies who are .NET enthusiasts most likely have no problem running Windows servers at which point you might as well just run the .NET Framework and runtime since it's free and is always cutting edge.

 

Second, MonoDevelop is probably my favorite open source/free IDE (more so than Eclipse or anything else I've used) but it's still far, far behind Visual Studio.  VS looks great, is extremely flexible and has hands down the most advanced debugger I've ever seen.  I can debug web apps, unmanaged code, script code, whatever.  The only thing I've actually witnessed MD being able to debug is managed console apps.  I work 99% on web applications and until MD can debug web apps (on all platforms), it's totally useless to me.  Until it can debug script code, it's severely limited to me.  I imagine by the time it does all this, VS 2010 will be out and set an even higher bar for MD to follow.

 

To summarize, Mono is a great platform and I appreciate all the effort that goes into it, but I think companies either "embrace the Microsoft world" and use Windows/.NET/VS or they "embrace the open source world" and use LAMP or Java and Eclipse.  Trying to say "This platform Microsoft invented is great, we've ported it over to the open source world but it's of course not as good as the real thing" is a tough sell to many companies..

 

Mike

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Stifu <stifu@...> wrote:

Mono is alive and kicking. Other than the number of posts here and on
monologue (http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/), which clearly shows Mono is
nowhere near dead (unlike, say, dotGNU), the gap between Mono 2.0 (last
year) and Mono 2.6 speaks volume about how fast things are moving.

1) I take it you saw roadmap? http://mono-project.com/Roadmap
As far as I know, other than WPF, pretty much everything in .NET is planned
for implementation in Mono.
The class status page (http://go-mono.com/status/) is also interesting,
although it doesn't tell you about future goals.
I believe Miguel said about a dozen of Novell devs worked on Mono (+
contributors), I don't know much other than that.

2-3) I agree about the lack of updated content / documentation... I believe
Olive (or part of it?) was merged with the main Mono branch at some point,
but I don't know the details.

4) I'd pick MonoDevelop over Eclipse, personally. Although less mature,
MonoDevelop is lighter and faster, and has just the features I need. It just
needs to be polished some more (stability improvements, bugs fixing, OS
parity by, for example, adding debugger support for everything on every
OS...). MonoDevelop has been worked on for years, and with the relatively
recent additions of debugging + Windows and OSX support, I guess the bulk of
the work has already been done. If MonoDevelop had only just been started, I
may agree with you, but MonoDevelop is there right now and already works
fine.
That said, that doesn't prevent Eclipse-enthusiasts from looking into Mono
with Eclipse, but I don't think Novell should bother at this point.

All of that said, few companies use (or even know) about Mono... which is a
shame. Hope that ends up changing.

cmdematos wrote:
>
> I don't want to stir up a hornets nest. It is my intent to see Mono as a
> strong enough offering to be able to recommend medium to large companies
> to commit to an Open technology stack that includes (and relies on) Mono.
> Forgive me if I am not well informed, I am definitely well intended.
>
> The following are issues that stop this from reaching any sort of reality:
> 1) There is no visible Mono timeline and release plan. What is Mono's
> intent and stated goals for the future? Will it try to maintain parity
> with Microsoft Dot.Net to some level, and if so what level and by what
> time-line?
>   1.1) What are mono's resources?
>   1.2) Who are mono's sponsors?
>   1.3) Are we resourcing up to maintain pace with our plans?
>
> 2) Many projects that should be enablers of achieving a reasonably parity
> with Microsoft Dot.Net have not been updated since Dec 2008 (such as
> Olive) If these are no longer strategic the thinking behind this should be
> made transparent.
>
> 3) The mono site has a mix of outdated pages statuses and some (very
> little) new content. I agree that the code is more important than the
> site, but it is less than professional to not date each page edit and
> structure the site so that the latest status and pages are always
> guaranteed to be clear and navigable. Please fix this.
>
> 4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and
> the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not
> implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and
> concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE
> infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a
> snow-balls hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a
> thought. I suggest that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it
> wont slow down Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.
>
> Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--

View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Is-Mono-serious--Is-Mono-still-alive--tp26132878p26133629.html

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[Ben Joldersma-3]

I'd like to chime in on this one.  Your position has many valid points, to be sure.  VS is an amazing tool.  .NET has better tools support.  Companies tend to go with all MS or all OSI / Java.  But certainly not all companies.  My company, 5to1.com, is one example.  The .NET Framework is certainly not the obvious choice for our business, nor is it for a growing class of businesses and projects.  

The biggest disadvantage to us of .NET is it's lack of support on non Windows platforms (specifically we happen to care about Linux.)  I'm not going to get into a general discussion of the independent merits of Mono, there are those on this list far better qualified than I on that note (I think some of the coolest Gnome software coming out these days is Mono based - Banshee, Gnome-Do, Tomboy, MD itself, what else?)  Rather, I'll focus on why we use the framework.  Have you ever tried to maintain a windows server farm of 150 nodes?  200 nodes?  500 nodes?  Your casual language speaking about .NET as something enthusiasts might like and would likely have no problem deploying to production in Windows suggests to me that I doubt you have.  If you have, you've got a staff of about 1 sysadmin for every 15 - 25 machines, if you're industry standard.  We use Amazon EC2 for provisioning, and the excellent Chef configuration management tool from OpsCode to mange our clusters.  Using Linux, EC2, and Chef, I can add 20 machines in ~10 minutes, fully configured, correct versions of mono, apache, mysql, solr, memcached, custom application code to meet increased demand.  Think about the cost savings - nothing in the windows world comes close.  Maybe .NET's garbage collector is faster than Mono's, but since I can optimize my whole data center at safe but minimal over capacity, my company doesn't pay for rackspace and watts for machines that sit idle 90% of the time (not to mention licensing fees) - in the long run, that means we win.

So yeah - linux is great, cloud computing is all the rage, azure is vaporware, so why use the CLR?  Why not use Java or PHP?  To avoid a flame war, I'll politely say both of those languages leave something to be desired.  And this is again where we intersect completely - LINQ, lamda functions, delegates, extension methods, appdomains, generics in dotnet, the DLR, built in support for truly running multiple languages, that long list of excellent innovations that Microsoft has so excelled at.  Those are the reasons to choose a platform for development.  Some of our guys use Visual Studio on Windows here - good for them.  They get a great debugger (although for script debugging, I'd take Firebug over VS any day) better profilers, code coverage, so on.  Being on Linux, I get other tools that are great - better git support, Meld, vim, having an OS that starts up in 12 seconds, in short, all of the reasons why I love linux.

At the end of the day, Mono let's me develop my programs in the platform I love, and deploy them in the best server environments in the world.  Thanks guys!

--
ben joldersma
craftsman
http://skullsquad.com
[o]: 206.973.8003
[c]: 206.349.2852

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Mike Christensen <mike@...> wrote:

A few comments:

 

First, I think Mono is a fantastic platform that's making huge advances with each release.  However, it simply doesn't compare with Microsoft .NET.  The .NET Framework has hundreds of people working on it, a near unlimited budget, and is the obvious choice for running .NET code.  It has one of the most advanced garbage collectors ever written, has a huge arsonal of profilers, code coverage tools, debuggers, third party frameworks, etc.  The way I see it, the .NET name is associated with Microsoft and Microsoft has somewhat of a bad rep in the open source community.  For this reason, those who have made the decision to go open source most likely already steer away from Microsoft based technologies.  Companies who are .NET enthusiasts most likely have no problem running Windows servers at which point you might as well just run the .NET Framework and runtime since it's free and is always cutting edge.

 

Second, MonoDevelop is probably my favorite open source/free IDE (more so than Eclipse or anything else I've used) but it's still far, far behind Visual Studio.  VS looks great, is extremely flexible and has hands down the most advanced debugger I've ever seen.  I can debug web apps, unmanaged code, script code, whatever.  The only thing I've actually witnessed MD being able to debug is managed console apps.  I work 99% on web applications and until MD can debug web apps (on all platforms), it's totally useless to me.  Until it can debug script code, it's severely limited to me.  I imagine by the time it does all this, VS 2010 will be out and set an even higher bar for MD to follow.

 

To summarize, Mono is a great platform and I appreciate all the effort that goes into it, but I think companies either "embrace the Microsoft world" and use Windows/.NET/VS or they "embrace the open source world" and use LAMP or Java and Eclipse.  Trying to say "This platform Microsoft invented is great, we've ported it over to the open source world but it's of course not as good as the real thing" is a tough sell to many companies..

 

Mike

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Stifu <stifu@...> wrote:

Mono is alive and kicking. Other than the number of posts here and on
monologue (http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/), which clearly shows Mono is
nowhere near dead (unlike, say, dotGNU), the gap between Mono 2.0 (last
year) and Mono 2.6 speaks volume about how fast things are moving.

1) I take it you saw roadmap? http://mono-project.com/Roadmap
As far as I know, other than WPF, pretty much everything in .NET is planned
for implementation in Mono.
The class status page (http://go-mono.com/status/) is also interesting,
although it doesn't tell you about future goals.
I believe Miguel said about a dozen of Novell devs worked on Mono (+
contributors), I don't know much other than that.

2-3) I agree about the lack of updated content / documentation... I believe
Olive (or part of it?) was merged with the main Mono branch at some point,
but I don't know the details.

4) I'd pick MonoDevelop over Eclipse, personally. Although less mature,
MonoDevelop is lighter and faster, and has just the features I need. It just
needs to be polished some more (stability improvements, bugs fixing, OS
parity by, for example, adding debugger support for everything on every
OS...). MonoDevelop has been worked on for years, and with the relatively
recent additions of debugging + Windows and OSX support, I guess the bulk of
the work has already been done. If MonoDevelop had only just been started, I
may agree with you, but MonoDevelop is there right now and already works
fine.
That said, that doesn't prevent Eclipse-enthusiasts from looking into Mono
with Eclipse, but I don't think Novell should bother at this point.

All of that said, few companies use (or even know) about Mono... which is a
shame. Hope that ends up changing.

cmdematos wrote:
>
> I don't want to stir up a hornets nest. It is my intent to see Mono as a
> strong enough offering to be able to recommend medium to large companies
> to commit to an Open technology stack that includes (and relies on) Mono.
> Forgive me if I am not well informed, I am definitely well intended.
>
> The following are issues that stop this from reaching any sort of reality:
> 1) There is no visible Mono timeline and release plan. What is Mono's
> intent and stated goals for the future? Will it try to maintain parity
> with Microsoft Dot.Net to some level, and if so what level and by what
> time-line?
>   1.1) What are mono's resources?
>   1.2) Who are mono's sponsors?
>   1.3) Are we resourcing up to maintain pace with our plans?
>
> 2) Many projects that should be enablers of achieving a reasonably parity
> with Microsoft Dot.Net have not been updated since Dec 2008 (such as
> Olive) If these are no longer strategic the thinking behind this should be
> made transparent.
>
> 3) The mono site has a mix of outdated pages statuses and some (very
> little) new content. I agree that the code is more important than the
> site, but it is less than professional to not date each page edit and
> structure the site so that the latest status and pages are always
> guaranteed to be clear and navigable. Please fix this.
>
> 4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and
> the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not
> implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and
> concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE
> infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a
> snow-balls hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a
> thought. I suggest that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it
> wont slow down Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.
>
> Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--

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[Miguel de Icaza-2]

Hello,

> I believe Miguel said about a dozen of Novell devs worked on Mono (+
> contributors), I don't know much other than that.

There are currently some 34 full time developers at Novell working on
Mono related technologies: Mono (core, class libraries, compilers), Mono
for Visual Studio, MonoTouch, MonoDevelop and Moonlight.

> 2-3) I agree about the lack of updated content / documentation... I believe
> Olive (or part of it?) was merged with the main Mono branch at some point,
> but I don't know the details.

WindowsBase, WCF and a handful of other pieces have moved to mcs.  

Olive now only contains WWF and WPF, and nobody at Novell is actively
working on either one of those.   If anyone feels like they really need
those, they could start with the code on SVN.

Miguel

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[Andrew.Buchanan]

Well I'll tell you why I use mono and how I use it.

In windows I use the .net framework 3.5 sp1
I develop and compile in Visual Studio 2008 Professional

But the machines I sell are mostly running linux.  The apps I develop are actually console apps for the most part that run as services, so I don't need or care about windows forms or any of that part of mono.  Honestly I really like Visual Studio and I prefer .net to java.  Mono lets me run the same code in windows and linux and use Visual Studio to do it.  And that's what I want.  Some of my apps are written in c and I have the necessary cross compile environment for that, but .net development is easier and so for any app that doesn't involve video encoding/decoding or similiar activities I use .net.  I leave c for the high performance stuff and it works well enough for me.

Sure if microsoft made .net for linux I'd probably use their version instead so I could use some of the wcf web service features that mono doesn't have, but I still compile most apps against .net 2.0 because it's all I need and mono's version of .net 2.0 has been good enough for me to use in production since about mono 2.0.1

I'd like to see a complete silverlight 3 version of moonlight asap and then wcf, but I'm sure other people would rather have full WPF or who knows what.  

I agree the website is a bit frustrating though.  I'd like a better idea of when 2.6 is coming out, November is pretty vague.  In particular with 2.6 I'm planning to upgrade all my mono 2.0.1 and 2.2 hosts so it would be nice to have a date to plan for that.