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Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you might only be doing web dev, so I appreciate that you might not have experience with this, but:

I've been looking at languages and VMs for doing GUI desktop app work. Specifically, cross-platform apps using native GUIs on each platform. Java (I normally use Clojure where I can) has decent cross-platform toolkits, but not so great native bindings. .NET obviously has good Windows GUI stuff, Mono's GTK# and Qyoto seem to work well for Gnome and KDE, and MonoMac seems to be going places. The main alternative seems to be to drop to low-level languages. (C, C++, Obj-C). Do you think it's worth it for me to go ahead with .NET and Mono considering the difficulties you've had with Mono?

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Like I said, I'm about a week away from forming a solid opinion, but my guess is that I'd use Mono.

I'm doing very simple web stuff (fcgi-type, if I can get the fcgi bindings to work) Also a bit of command-line/batch work.

As far as I can tell, .NET is the best match for what you want. If i were you, I might want to do a bit of poking around to see how the low-level stuff is configured first.

Do NOT use the fastcgi server for ASP.NET. They are too unstable for use in production. Use mod_mono instead.

maybe you could help me.

I don't want ASP.NET. All I want is a resident .NET program that gets called when an URL is visited, getting all the parms passed like CGI. I can handle the rest.

I really don't want or need the ASP.NET stack.

Is there some way to do this? So far all I have is a stand-alone program that gets loaded each time using Apache and CGI. Can't seem to figure out how to make it resident and re-entryable without using the HttpHandler objects off the ASP.NET stack, which I don't want to do. Lord knows it was tough enough getting an environment working. Going through the motions of overriding a part of the ASP.NET pipeline in a foreign environment is probably just a bridge too far for me for this project.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

It sounds like what you are looking for is exactly what I am working on right now: https://github.com/jacksonh/manos/blob/master/docs/tutorial/...

OK, thanks, will do!

First plan of action is to build a small, (more or less) throwaway app that uses all the major bits we're interested in to get a feel for the platform before betting the farm on it.

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