Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Mono embraces VB.Net developers

Miguel on the move – I must admit, he’s persistent :) If PHP/Perl/Ruby was a niche developer set for Linux, VB is THE niche for Windows devs. Will be interesting to see if there’s any uptake for running these VB.Net apps on Linux.

Nice plug for Mainsoft as well.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5656359853.html

“From its inception, the Mono project has focused on creating a development framework that allows .NET software to run across all the leading server and client platforms” stated Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms at Novell and founder of the Mono project. “The delivery of the Visual Basic compiler is a key step forward in this process. Now, developers do not need any Linux expertise to create applications that will run easily on Linux.”

“The ability to write software that runs easily across multiple platforms has long been a holy grail for developers,” continued de Icaza. “The Mono Visual Basic compiler is a milestone step forward in this direction. Using the software skills they already know, developers can now reach a much broader audience, creating applications that run without modification on all the major operating system platforms.”

“The Run-time piece was in place last year,” de Icaza told Linux-Watch in an exclusive interview. “But it wasn’t perfect and it was very buggy. So this was rewritten from scratch from Visual Basic by Mainsoft with some help from Microsoft.” Mainsoft specializes in porting programs written in Microsoft languages, such as ASP.NET and C#, to Linux, Unix, and J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition)-based platforms. Mainsoft has often worked closely with the Mono Project.