March 22, 2006

Mono at BrainShare 2006

Wow! This is better than I had hoped for! Our mono booth and the daily mono presentation that Frank Rego (mono's new Program Manager) is giving has been creating a lot of interest.

At the booth, Wade Berrier has been demoing mono applications running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. He has been doing a great live demonstration using MonoDevelop and creating a Gtk# 2.0 app using the Widget palette brought by stetic that Lluis recently incorporated in MD. That has people's jaws dropping since most of them attending this conference are not developers and although had notions of what mono is, they had no idea of how advance it has become in the IDE field!

It has been terrific to see folks from all walks of life approach the booth and come carrying the applications that they are currently working on contained in an USB keydrive and having us run it on the different platforms. To most of them, they tend to be very dazzled when they see their WinForms projects run on Linux (SLED 10) often without modification. Some of the apps they have come talk about range from GroupWare clients, Decision Support Systems (DSS), Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) front ends (some web based others SmartClients), etc.

One of the most interesting conversations I had at the booth yesterday was with three High School teachers from the Salt Lake City school system. I attended a session given by no other than Niel Bornstein, on Novell Linux Desktop and 1:1 Computing in the School. This session was packed, and the great thing was to see - something that paco use to do in a previous life - folks that come from a K-12 system ops and administration background that knew about mono and were looking to see how much has mono progressed on the ASP.NET front so they could host their academic support .NET apps on Apache on SLES! However, back to the three SLC school teachers...

They were seeking my assistance to see how they "could find" mono on NLD 9. You see, folks like Apple and Microsoft have long supported the use of their products in the classroom. I guess they want to start them early. So guess what? These guys wanted to use mono and MonoDevelop to teach programming to their High School students!!!!!!!!! We need to talk a lot more about that!

It has been a great opportunity to meet with interesting folks from VMware, HP, Dell, AMD and Oracle. I always go to see if they know what is mono and how it takes advantage of AMD 64 CPUs and to also find out if folks like Dell and HP will ever deliver something along the lines of a Notebook that has an AMD 64 CPU, nVidia graphics chipset and a freaking wireless chipset that would be supported by SLED straight out of the box.

For all of my Microsoft centric readership and .NET Framework/Visual Studio programmers, I have one word for you:

AppArmour

If you already like MS .Net Framework and Visual Studio - like I do - then imagine your applications running on Linux thanks to mono but with the added insurance that AppArmour can provide! As you can tell, I am very impressed with it.

I have to get back to the trenches, but until my next entry, I leave you with some pics:

Frank over at the Developer's Den
Frank at the Dev Den
The Mono Booth in Action
Wade, Frank and I trying to answer all the questions
Paco, Attendee and Wade
Paco, Attendee and Wade
The iFolder Crew
iFolder team mates Brady and Calvin
Mono and AppArmour Novell employees and enthusiasts.
Wade and Dominic
Posted by martinf at March 22, 2006 11:59 AM
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