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And this was because .Net 2.0 was in beta during Vista's development (which is five years and counting) and they did not want to slow down development further by working with buggy tools.

The applications of Mono within Novell have all been fairly small and simple thus far (what Zenworks does is not particularly complex); very few of them have been officially released; and none of them are particularly complex. Microsoft does have some .Net applications in development (the delayed MS Paint replacement, Acrylic, being just one), but Vista and Office are the priority at the moment, and .Net just doesn't fit in there.

And this was because .Net 2.0 was in beta during Vista's development (which is five years and counting) and they did not want to slow down development further by working with buggy tools.

Sorry, but .Net has been all the rage for ~5 years? If not now, when? While managed code may not make any kind of sense for core services, there is a small mountain of administrative stuff which, if .Net were really a 'bet the company' affair, would have made perfect sense.
On the other hand, given Redmond's apparent unwillingness to eat its own dogfood, the question becomes: at what point will some successor technology come along to save us from the (apparent) shortcomings of .Net?

This question has not been answered to my satisfaction.

And prolly never will.

This question has not been answered to my satisfaction.

As the saying goes, "There are no guarantees in life." The mono open source implementation I don't have any problems using since C# is a standardized language. The windows.forms classes are all proprietary and are protected by intellectual property patents. They are still a gray zone and I would avoid using them until significant evidence builds to show that Microsoft will not run to protect that intellectual property. There is no real answer on this matter since it is unresolved and really hasn't been tested yet legally.

A safer route to develop commercial applications would be to combine C# with GTK widgets via GTK#. This would yield a true cross-platform application without questions of intellectual property violations. Keep in mind you would have to install the GTK runtime on your windows clients. To see an example of GTK working on Windows download Gimp 2.0 image editor for Windows.

Edited 2006-03-30 22:27

Another advantage with GTK is it's a far more powerful toolkit, and once you get used to it, it's much quicker to develop with.
I believe there's also something for using qt if you prefer it. But basically: There's only one good reason to use Winforms, and that's that you can't afford to have the dependency.

Thanks buff and ma_d for the well-explained responses. Sounds like there is plenty of "safe" stuff to work with. For those who modded me down.... uh, why?

As the saying goes, "There are no guarantees in life." The mono open source implementation I don't have any problems using since C# is a standardized language.

I'm afraid not. A lot of people like to tell us that Mono is just as unsafe as anything else, but it isn't and there is not 'plenty of safe', standardised stuff.

The submission of any standard to the ECMA does not protect anyone against any patents, IP claims etc. that anyone may have on it. All that is required is a very basic signed document from the submitter to play fair 'for the duration that they are ECMA members and their submissions remain ECMA standards'. It is not legally binding. Should they decide not to play fair then the worst case scenario is that the standards submitted would cease to be ECMA standards and Microsoft may be asked to leave the ECMA committee. I hardly think that's going to bother them, because that doesn't stop them using it, obviously. However, everyone else is up in the air.

Additonally, if you read Microsoft's patents, what does make them dangerous is that they specify that they are applicable to anyone adhering to the ECMA stuff, and use terms like 'running on a CLR' etc. If you are running on an ECMA compliant CLR then that applies to you. If you were to implement something similar on a JVM environment, for example, then that would be the grey area everyone talks about. However, since Microsoft want to protect their own IP and inventions first, they specifically mention the ECMA, CLR, CLS etc. the the exclusion of everything else.

How so? are you scared about running Linux, and the possibility that it tramples on 4000 difference patents, including some held by Microsoft?

Please, Mono is out there, and Microsoft can jump scream till the cows come home, but it won't change the fact that once something is out of the box, the chances of them trying to get something out of their patent portfolio is minor.

Personally, Microsoft doesn't care; they know that Mono, in regards to Microsoft .NET compatibility will always be behind the eighth ball, and in regards to development, its pretty clear; if one were developing C# applications, they would be running Windows and VS.NET because the current crop of IDE's for C# are absolutely terrible.

The fact that GTK# tracks the GTK enhancements as they're added rather than with Winforms, which will be a matter of Microsoft developing, and mono playing catch up.

GTK# is layed upon GTK, so, it has superior layout management, but also superior i18n/l10n support (multilanguage in documents for example), superior a11y support, is more portable. That was comes to my mind right away, but I'm sure I forgot some things (like superior session management).