.NET on Other Platforms

Two initiatives in the open source community have also nurtured the idea of bringing the .NET Framework to other platforms. These two projects are Mono (http://www.go-mono.com), which is spearheaded by Ximian, Inc. (http://www.ximian.com/), and DotGNU project's Portable.NET (http://www.dotgnu.org).

At the time of writing this book, Mono, for instance, was available in its 0.26 release and was available on a couple of Linux distributions, including RedHat Linux, Mandrake, and SuSE. The 0.26 release of Mono included the C# language compiler, CLR, and a set of class libraries including ASP.NET and ADO.NET. The project also provides an implementation of ASP.NET to run dynamic Web applications and Web services as an Apache Web Server module and a standalone XSP Web Server. Both source code and binary distributions of the 0.26 release were available.

If you are interested in trying out .NET on other platforms, particularly Linux, I would recommend browsing the Web sites of both projects to understand what functionality is available and what has not yet been implemented.

SHOP TALK : WILL .NET BE AVAILABLE ON THE UNIX PLATFORM, PRODUCTION GRADE?

A key advantage today enjoyed by the Java programming language and its associated Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform for developing and deploying enterprise applications is the capability to "write once and run anywhere ." J2EE applications can be ported (the ease of porting typically depends on the amount of platform or application server-specific capabilities utilized) from Windows to the Unix flavors. It appears that it will take quite a significant amount of time before .NET applications can be developed and/or deployed on other platforms in "production grade." In my opinion, initiatives such as Rotor, Mono, and Portable.NET have indicated that a Unix implementation of .NET is definitely feasible , possibly outside Microsoft.