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Jason,

The above statement makes it clear that you do not really follow Mono closely and your opinions are based on rumors rather than real life experience.

Let me explain:

I have not seen you post ever on our Mono mailing lists requesting the specific feature that is keeping your code from running on Mono.

I am having a hard time coming up with a feature of .NET 1.1 that you need to have on Mono (the stuff we do not implement does not make any sense on Linux, like support for WMI).

Mono implements quite happily all the core functionality up to .NET 3.5 with gaps on Windows Workflow (not there), WCF (Partial) and WPF (we are not going to implement it).

People that are adopting Mono (many of them) use our Migration Analysis tool to identify the spots that require rewriting (to remove Windows dependencies, and provide the Linux equivalent for example) and get moving on with their life.

From the statistics that we have colleced with the Moma Tool 1,592 application work out of the box; 1,823 require between 1 and 3 source code changes another 1,200 require from 4 to 10 changes. Now if you are even a remotely competent programmer, yous should be able to find work around for up to 10 changes in say, an afternoon?

The rest are more complicated, the next 3,000 or so reports will likely take from a week worth of work to a full scale reimplementation effort (the ones that have up to say 300 P/Invoke calls).

As for innovation in Mono: nothing anywhere says that we should stop at working on compatibility with .NET. We created Mono to create better applications for Linux, which is why we created bindings to Gtk# as well as some other couple hundred libraries: because we want to improve our ecosystem.

"your only goal should be" or "I want you to"?

Perhaps they just want to be able to program in a decent statically-typed language with a GC and a JIT compiler and Gtk bindings?

That seems like a reasonable thing to want to do, and a worthy reason to split off a fork. It's certainly not worth hijacking as big or important a project as Mono to do so.

Mono needs to get a direction and follow it. At the moment, they're heading in a bunch of directions at once. If they don't want to be "A .NET Runtime That Works Anywhere", then they should say as much and stand aside so that somebody else can do it.

> hijacking

Uh, people are giving their time to create what they need / want. Welcome to open source, right? I don't think it's possible to "hijack" an open source project. As said above: patches are probably welcome.

In the end it just sounds like you want free support from a company like Microsoft/Novell without paying a dollar.

What 1.1 things don't work? I thought they were fully 2.0 compatible?

It has been quite good in my experience, obviously if you are doing windows specific things like registry or security it won't work, but that is to be expected.

Ah, but security isn't windows-specific. It's essential if you want to use anybody's APIs that require SSL (and sometimes have broken certs). And it doesn't work in Mono today.

This could possibly be fixed by now, but last I tried, the C# sample code to interact with Amazon S3 didn't run under Mono.

I'm not familiar with the S3 .net api.. but linux doesn't have the notion of central certificate store like windows does. Therefore if you are relying on that existing, you are going to need to change your code.

It is certainly possible to use SSL with mono, many people do it.

Odd, lots of people have absolutely no problem doing just that.

Perhaps a little Googling is in order?

I lead a dev team in the real world, using mono for all our work, and I don't need them to do any such thing. Your definition of the "ONLY" goal for them is utter claptrap and certainly not a definition of what the "real world needs".

Stop confusing your desires ("Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy") with the only sane direction for them to go.

I certainly wouldn't thank them for slavishly copying .net 1.1 or any such thing. If you want that so badly, feel free to submit patches, I'm sure they'll gladly accept.

You've piqued my curiosity. What are you using Mono for if not to run C# outside of Windows?

For one thing, there are lots of C# programs that can run on Mono outside of Windows, even if some parts of .NET are not yet implemented.

I have never programmed with .NET (been coding exclusively in linux for years), but the framework looks interesting and the WPF has caught my eye. I will probably be one of those who will be exclusively learning the mono version of the .NET story and C#/F#. Though I guess there are very few people in my boat.

i also use mono on ubuntu. if the scope is larger than what i want to do in a scripting language, like bash, then i use c#. it's a great language. i have my eye on mvc support in mono, because if all goes well, i can save a lot of money on windows 2008 licenses.

We're running C# code, and increasingly some F#, but not at all interested in taking desktop or web applications from Windows and dropping them onto Macs or Linux.

We're historically a microsoft shop but recently (in the last 18 months or so) have started running linux backend servers for many of our services running on EC2. If I wanted to be buzzword compliant I'm sure I could come up with some string of cloud nonsense to describe it.

We have something that looks kinda like Hadoop crossed with an app server that we can deploy components in.

I'd be happier with a solid final version of Mono.Simd rather than slavishly filling in any missing parts of older .net.

Sounds like we're doing similar stuff. The code I'd like to run under Mono is neither ASP.NET nor WinForms. It's plain vanilla string processing and HttpRequesting with some minor crypto and SSL thrown in to use AWS.

That's the stuff I'd expect to be there and it's not.

Care to detail exactly what is missing?

And if you do not know what is missing, download our tool, and it will do the work for you:

www.mono-project.com/Moma

That's the fun part. The tool says everything is good to go. That's partially why I felt so burned by it, having assurances that everything I was doing was implemented. Running the code, it doesn't even thow. It just quietly exits.

After a few weeks running into issues like that, I just quietly exited myself. Windows EC2 boxes are only 25% more expensive than Linux ones, and they run .NET natively and correctly, so my particular problem is solved.

I am quite sure that complete compatibility with any one release of .NET would silence a lot of FUD by Microsoft and make pointy-haired bosses less reluctant to sign checks for deploying .NET/Mono applications on non-Microsoft platforms.

If it's you who are developing, it's easy to code around the holes, but if you need a closed-source application designed to run on .NET (and I don't know why people want these things, but they do) you have little to no choice but going Microsoft.

And that's a dealbreaker for Mono more often than you imagine.