The Irish Penguin

The Irish Penguin branches out to a new platform this week as Mono, the Linux-y version .NET of is tackled. What wonders await…

Well, thus far, we’re not actually sure, although early signs are promising. We pulled down the MonoDevelop codebase as well as it’s dependancies via Subversion and most things built without major problems (on Ubuntu Fiesty) and a little help from the fabulous monodevelop-list AT lists.ximian.com (just replace AT with @) #. Although the holy grail of having a happily built MonoDevelop environment is proving just a little elusive - a conflict between Cario from v1.0 mono libraries and Cairo from v2.0 libraries is a spanner in the works. This should be a straightforward one to iron out.

It will be interesting to compare the Form’s/Widget designer to the fabulous QT Designer and see if MonoDevelop provides a stable and first rate environment for doing GUIs. But of course, even more interesting will be the politics…

Recently, a new product has hit the market for those folks who would like to develop in .NET, and in particular Visual Studio, but prefer to run their application on Linux.

Although you could already code up .NET solutions in MonoDevelop - which itself has made great progress recently - most enterprises will only want to write .NET server and web apps in Visual Studio. Mainsoft has seen the gap in the market and filled it with a free plugin for Visual Studio, called Grasshopper, which lets you deploy to Linux. It achieves this by compiling the application to Java bytecode rather than the .NET intermediate language and also leverages work done in the Mono project, which has already done much work in bringing .NET to Linux.

In other news, Silverlight has been successfully ported to Linux through an incredible hackathon effort by Miguel de Icaza and his Mono team! Going under the name of Moonlight, the port was pretty much wrapped up in 21 days - so it’s amazing to think that with all this going on Miguel has any time to keep his blog updated!

Just when you thought you’d gotten the hang of the good ol’ fashioned .NET webservices (the ASMX variety) those Redmond boys went and changed everything with the release of WCF! The benefits of WCF webservices are that they’re considerably more flexible but the transition can be a lot steeper than you’d expect. Here’s a nice little guide by Dominick Baier on some of the day-to-day areas of the API that can catch you out unawares
Hosting WCF Services in ASP.NET - The Survival Guide.