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Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

mono-project.com

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Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#481

Post by chgs »

toyg wrote: post #460
pantalaimon wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

back when .NET was first launched it was advertised as the new way of making desktop applications on Windows. Visual C# made it very easy to design GUI interfaces. So this "it's all for backend now" notion is surprising.

.Net is "Microsoft Java". Like Java it was designed to do everything, but as desktop development died (and mobile development was locked down by Apple and Google, limiting it to their corporate languages), it pivoted towards networked applications.

Visual J++ was Microsoft’s Java

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#482

Post by chungy »

kragen wrote: post #480
ptx wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian developers can do it right because they're not affiliated with the vendor, so they can disable user-hostile features and settings that the vendor enables by default.

i don't think debian developers are actually prohibited from becoming employees of the vendor, but i think that if they get caught pushing malware, their dd status is likely to be revoked, and the process that allowed them to become dds is likely to be reviewed. any dd can generally push a change to any debian package to the archive; it's a major level of trust. that's why it's generally not realistic to try to get o…

There's a large segment of Debian Developers that are also the upstream maintainers/owners of various projects. I can't think of any paid examples, but volunteer ones are plentiful.

Perhaps the Debian project would force a .NET package to come with telemetry disabled by default, but for as long as said employee can abide by the rules of Debian, I don't really see any reason it can't be done.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#483

Post by aussieguy1234 »

Kwpolska wrote: post #426
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's say they wanted to use Linux, but run their windows software on it.

Why would they want to use Linux though?

Who knows why, but they already are. Apparently hotmail in the early days used Linux for some servers. Linux is pretty common in Azure.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#484

Post by PinkMilkshake »

toastercup wrote: post #247
troymc wrote: post #67

Fun fact: Second Life, the virtual world, has an in-world scripting language called LSL, and it gets compiled to bytecode that gets run on a virtual machine. Initially, it got compiled to bytecode that ran on an in-house virtual machine, but in 2008, they switched over to compiling LSL to Mono bytecode to run on the Mono virtual machine. I wonder if that's still how it works. (I haven't been involved with SL for a lo…

It does indeed still work that way! We even still support the old, in-house VM, known as LSO2: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSO We're hard at work adding Luau ( https://luau.org ) as a supported language for both in-world scripting as well as client/viewer-side scripting. As a handy byproduct of that, LSL will also gain the ability to be compiled to Luau bytecode, allowing us to eventually (someday, at least) she…

Cool! LSL is such an interesting language. Having an explicit state with entry and exit functions is quite unique I think, and seems like it could be useful outside of SL. Given that scripts are isolated and communicate via messaging over channels (IIRC), was there ever any interest in executing it on the BEAM virtual machine?

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#485

Post by jwrallie »

neonsunset wrote: post #342
jwrallie wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When using Microsoft repositories you need to explicitly opt out on telemetry collection. I think telemetry collection alone should be a good reason for Debian to consider repackaging it. I don’t want telemetry to be collected on my GNU/Linux machine, thanks Microsoft, but you already have so much telemetry from my Windows machine, please leave my other machines alone.

I hate to defend telemetry of all things but in this particular case the criticism is unfounded and lacks context: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/telemetry https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr... https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/tree/main/src/Cli/dotnet/Telem... In any case, Debian would use https://github.com/dotnet/source-build and dotnet/dotnet, and could easily include the argume…

Your second source mentions you have to change a variable in bash to opt out for telemetry, I fail to see where the FUD is.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#486

Post by pjmlp »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #437
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, .net is for azure cloud webapps, that's how modern software is made. Then wrap them in electron to make them native.

WebView2 would probably be the way to go, now... at least for Windows as the target. https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2/

Even the "port to WinUI" from UWP for the PhotosApp, is in similar vein, making use of Webview2 instead of native Windows.

When Microsoft teams behave as such, why should we keep paying attention?

For native Windows, Forms, WPF, and even MFC is way better in VS tooling than WinUI C++.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#487

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Kye wrote: post #391
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shift is slow, but it has been ongoing for years, and is pretty much wrapping up now. .NET 5 was released in November, 2020 and that was the "beginning of the end" of the shift over. For what I do, it's not really "Windows development" in any meaningful way. It is business functionality with HTTP, message queues etc, developed on mostly Windows laptops, and deployed to mostly Linux instances on the cloud. Not tha…

It sounds like .NET is on the way toward becoming the Java competitor it set out to be.

Is Java on the way to being a .NET Competitor yet? I can't answer that, I don't know Java well enough.

I am told that the C# language has evolved faster and better than Java. Despite its origins in .NET 1.0 being basically a "Microsoft Java".

But paradoxically there is now more diversity of actively used languages that target the JVM. e.g. Kotlin, Scala, Clojure.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#488

Post by register »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #479
register wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's way better than Flutter. Avalonia really works on desktop.. :). Also the model is WPF so whoever know a little bit of legacy .NET framework will be able to write Avalonia apps in no-time

I don't know any .net, and have never heard of this until now. Only stories with comments on HN are from eight years ago. Although I liked the screenshots on the linked site, it doesn't seem to have much buzz around it. And unfortunately, the only stench I can't stand more than Google's is Microsoft's.

I do not follow buzz. I am an engineer by education and attitude and always try to investigate my options based on my needs and requirements. I use buzz only to drive me trough my investigations. In my case I had a desktop application that had to run on Windows and MacOs and needed support for Rich text format and rendering of custom graphs.

Following buzz I started to do a prototype with Flutter and stopped after a few days as I found out that most of the open source controls I was using had bugs on Windows Desktop. Then I moved to MAUI and discovered that in order to have some decent Rich Text support my only option was Blazor Hybdrid. Nedless to say I found bugs that prevented my prototype to work correctly. Then I moved to UNO and found that it doesn't have full Rich text format support. I was able to find some .NET open source libraries for doing text layout on Skia and with that I was able to find a partial solution that was however pretty complicated. Out of curiosity I investigated Avalonia and found that everything that I needed had full support. Being fluent in WFP I built the prototype in 3 days and I never looked back.

Your experience might vary depending on your fluency of WFP but I found that, considering Windows Desktop as a target platform, Flutter and MAUI are absolutely the worst options. In my opinion Uno is better than Avalonia when considering web application support but Avalonia has more coverage of the WPF api with respect to what Uno does for WinUi. And for sure marketing is the worst part of Avalonia while it is the BEST for MAUI and Flutter.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#489

Post by anymouse123456 »

bmitc wrote: post #300
lolinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there somewhere where someone new to the ecosystem can get a simple introduction to all of these different terms and which ones are still relevant today? I looked into .NET somewhat recently and came away with the apparently mistaken impression that Mono was how .NET did cross-platform. I guess I must have been reading old docs, but I'm pretty sure they were at least semi-official. Is there good documentation some…

For modern .NET, you don't need to know anything about the legacy terms of Mono, .NET Core, .NET Framework, .NET Standard, etc. All you need is .NET 8 SDK. It's fully-cross platform and installs support for both C# and F#. For example, just download .NET 8 SDK on whatever platform, which is usually very easy on most platforms, and then run `dotnet fsi` to get into an F# REPL.

PSA for new players.

Do not under any circumstance trust Microsoft for anything at all.

They have a decades-long history of treating their best customers with contempt.

They will break or deprecate whatever you rely on, and they will do it without warning.

Re: Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team

#490

Post by toyg »

chgs wrote: post #481
toyg wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.Net is "Microsoft Java". Like Java it was designed to do everything, but as desktop development died (and mobile development was locked down by Apple and Google, limiting it to their corporate languages), it pivoted towards networked applications.

Visual J++ was Microsoft’s Java

They were legally forbidden from going the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish route there, so they had to build their own version from scratch. C# exists because J++ couldn't.
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