Paco's Blog

Mono Evangelism - Part I

The panorama for Mono in the Dallas/Fort Worth area is certainly off to a good start. First let me tell you briefly about the presentation that Joseph Hill gave to the North Texas Linux User Group.

The NTLUG is a great group of folks that meet at the Nokia building in Las Colinas. Joseph delivered a presentation that focused mostly on the things that you can do with Mono rather than allocating the majority of his allotted time to defining what is Mono. This proved to be a great choice! The crowd was certainly engaged throughout his delivery and asked a lot of pertinent questions. He did a few slides and then turned his attention to demonstrating running copies of Beagle and Tomboy in his SuSe 9.2 powered laptop.

Although audience was mostly composed of the NTLUG regulars (SysAdmin types and not so much developers), there were quite a few folks that went there because of Mono.

Perhaps the most interesting sentiment that I perceived from the questions being asked was that most Linux users were totally ready to use Gtk# applications in Windows even if these apps were not identical in their look and feel with other "Windows" applications.

I want to invite all windows users that have the .NET Framework 1.1 Runtime installed to also install our Gtk# 1.9.1 Runtime installer. If you are a developer and have Visual Studio .NET 2003 installed and/or the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK, I would recommend that you install our Gtk# 1.9.1 Win32 installer for the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK. Then, go ahead and install these applications:

Gaim for Windows - Without the GTK+ Runtime

The Gimp 2.2 for Windows - Again no need to install the GTK+ Runtime since our Gtk# Runtime installer will satisfy those dependencies.

AbiWord - AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft. Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth.

Gnumeric - The Gnome Office Spreadsheet. This is a very good spreadsheet application that may give Excel and OpenOffice a run for their money! The creator of Gnumeric is pretty sharp fellow also :)
NOTE: For now you must use the GTK+ Runtime that comes with Gnumeric. :( Hopefully, we wil revise the GTK+ runtime that we bundle with our Gtk# installers so we meet and/or exceed the base requirements of Gnumeric for Windows.

Running all of the above applications will give you an idea of just how powerful GTK+ applications can be and how Gtk#/Mono can enable you to achieve similar results across so many more platforms than just the choices made available by Microsoft and their Operating Systems.

Understand that I am not trying to be misleading here. The applications I just sent you links to are likely C or C++ coded applications and not written in C# or VB.NET. However, keep in mind that I am making a call to arms to create applications that will have as much stature in both the Windows and Linux world from your Windows dev environment using Gtk# and/or System.Windows.Forms.

A guy called Daniel Morgan already got started and he is the example I follow.

Over the next few days I will be making a blog entry that will review the aftermath of my Mono presentation at the Fort Worth .NET User Group. Expect the slide deck used in the presentation as well as a less than stellar video of the event :)

The progress being made on bmcs (the new Basic compiler) and the Managed Windows Forms is exiting and very promising. However, I want to make sure that the VB.NET developers don't feel that they have to wait before they can start sharing their creations with the *NIX world. To that end, I am now dedicating some time to improve the Glade# and the soon to be available Gtk# Visual Studio .NET 2003 project templates for Visual Basic .NET. Within the next couple of weeks I will post some VB/Gtk# code for our experts to review and hopefully we will promptly make that a part of the Gtk# Win32 Installer for the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK.

Posted by martinf at January 20, 2005 08:08 AM