There’s a brief news item in getdotgnu.com on how to get ASP.NET working on DotGNU Portable.net .
ASP.NET forms and Sessions also seem to be working fine. This also works on an Ipaq handhelds as well – like PocketASP did. The Amiga port is also underway. This should also work on OpenBSD (after turning off stack protectors in gcc for GC support).
I didn’t even know getdotgnu even EXISTED, and I’m usually up to snuff on the workings of the .NET world…
The article was nice, but if it was never linked here I would’ve never even known about its existance!
Actually, getdotgnu.com was launched for the public a day ago
They tell us to get Novell’s code:
“XSP is an ASP.NET server from Novell written in C#”
So, why not using Mono instead? I’m missing somethinng, i know, it puzzles me ๐
Can’t we all just get along and work together? If DotGNU and Mono joined forces years ago, today we had Mono + Windows Forms support. Mono is better overall, while DotGNU has good Windows Forms support.
They aren’t going to join forces for the same reason that the GNOME and KDE people haven’t joined forces. It’s about control. Everybody wants their own little piece of control so we in turn get multiple projects trying to do the same thing albeit differently. And we wait and wait until they plug away and years later we get something useful. It’s a paradox that I don’t see going away anytime soon.
I’d love to see that….
I wish there was more info.
Contrary to popular perception, dotGNU was started before Mono. Although having “control” is part of the reason why dotGNU and Mono haven’t joined forces, a bigger reason is bad blood between major developers of the projects. You can peruse some of the respective projects mailing list archives to see.
Also, portable.NET(dotGNU) is under the GNU umbrella, while Mono has more liberal licenses. When the Mono project was announced Stallman actually had the nerve to call the Mono project a GNU project.
I don’t think it’s correct to say “mono is better overall” – their class library is more complete and they have a usable JIT, yes, but they don’t have the better technology per-se.
Personally, I think Portable .NET’s “low level stuff” is better designed *and* implemented.
Also, at the beginning Ximian changed Mono’s class library from a proper licence (LGPL) to a – for this purpose – more risky licence (the MIT X11 licence they are currently using). I heard it was at Intel’s request, I don’t know if that is true, though.
I call it risky because mono has some home-made problems to software patents and the risk of getting proprietary if Novell wishes to do so.
See http://wiki.dotgnu.org/PatentFUD and read “Difference between DotGNU and Mono with respect to the patents issue” at the top.
Of course for most people that’s no reason to stop using mono, but I think people should be aware of this problem, instead of all the myths they read from other posts (people mostly speculating because MS is evil in general etc. etc.
Also, Evert, XSP is a GPL’ed webserver written in C#, there is nothing wrong with Novell having the copyright on it?
PS: I wonder when we will see the first news article where its comments are about the article and not about dotgnu<->mono
I now see your main point, as long as it’s GPL’ed, it’s all right to use a part of the Mono project (AFAIK now, XSP is part of Mono, but with a different licence?)
Anyway, I appreciate both projects very much!
Regarding the article, i think it’s a clear notification + instruction, inviting enough to give the mentioned software a try.
“I don’t think it’s correct to say “mono is better overall” – their class library is more complete and they have a usable JIT, yes, but they don’t have the better technology per-se.”
No offense, but if they’ve got a more complete class library and a usable JIT, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mono is, infact, better. Portable.NET may have better technology, but that means nothing to me, the developer. =d
i prefer to use java
often faster, run on win, mac, linux, palm, ppc, phone…
very easy to learn
a lot of work
Of course for most people that’s no reason to stop using mono, but I think people should be aware of this problem, instead of all the myths they read from other posts (people mostly speculating because MS is evil in general etc. etc.
>
>
What myths are you talking about? Weren’t you paying attention to Microsoft’s BS during the whole Sender ID mess?
And you still think anything related to either .NET can be trusted?
More fool you.
They tell us to get Novell’s code:
“XSP is an ASP.NET server from Novell written in C#”
So, why not using Mono instead? I’m missing somethinng, i know, it puzzles me ๐
Because pnet runs on more platforms and is, currently, more flexible interms of build options (you can slim it down quite a lot using the inbuilt or custom profiles). Is Mono working on Amigas yet?
No offense, but if they’ve got a more complete class library and a usable JIT, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mono is, infact, better
It depends on what you’re doing. PNET+XSP would be better on embedded platforms. Mono many dependecies (glib for example) which makes it difficult to port to tiny platforms. PNET, on the other hand, requires only the standard C library to get up and running with the basic functionality of the CLR (you can even use MS VC++ to compile pnet’s engine!).
PNET has a *solid* and well designed base which allows all the missing features to be added without having to constantly rewrite code over and over again. If anyone has any doubts, just download the code for mono and pnet and compare them.
For the moment, mono is better for developers because it is more complete (*) but I would still keep an eye on pnet if I were you
(*) PNET has more complete threading and windows forms implementation than mono. They are finally turning around and using the same managed based approach for Windows Forms which DotGNU has been using for over a year.
Hey Tum,
I think its great that there is a different implementation of the .NET framework for Linux, and I think
you guys are doing a great job. But the way you promote
your project has dubious merit.
For instance, if the code is so “solid”, how come you
need “patches” to xsp? How come you need patches to the
Mono libraries? Its simple, because PNet is not complete.
If your code is so good, why do you need to use Mono
code? Simple, because it is incomplete.
You claim PNet’s code is cleaner, because features
can be added to it without rewriting it. That is the
most empty statement I have ever heard from you. You are
a brilliant programmer, and even you can tell that this
argument is pure bullshit. Lets see how many changes you
guys will need for a precise GC or to implement a JIT.
Btw, you mentioned once that Mono had many ifdefs,
you might want to compare pnet ifdef count vs Mono ifdef
count and get back to us with the results.
As for threading, it is clearly easy to get threading
easily done with an interpreter: check a flag here, check
a flag there on each iteration, things are more difficult
with a JIT engine, and even in that case, we are likely
more complete than anything you have (we are aware of a
few NotImplementedExceptions, which so far nobody uses, and
we are actively fixing).
Miguel.
> For instance, if the code is so “solid”, how come you
need “patches” to xsp? How come you need patches to the
Mono libraries? Its simple, because PNet is not complete.
> “patches” to xsp
xsp doesn’t check if cscc is in the path and needs to be hacked to uses cscc . I should get back with a patch for xsp on that .
> patches to mono libraries
what the hell are you talking about ?. only ml-pnet was modified and that was for the ICalls.cs internal calls in mono’s System.Web.dll (as of 0.6.8) .
> If your code is so good, why do you need to use Mono
code?
http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/2001-August/004877.html
> you might want to compare pnet ifdef count vs Mono
> ifdef count and get back to us with the results.
I don’t think you get it here – pnet has those in a seperate
module called support/ , not mixed into the internal call
code.
Anyway, nice to see Mono starting do winforms in Managed
space. Now actually you should have listened to Neil
a year ago