Developing cross-platform programs that rely on Windows Forms takes a big step forward with the latest release of the Mono platform.
by Paul Ferrill
June 2, 2005
ross-platform software development means different things to different people. For many programmers immersed in Microsoft languages such as VB.Net or C#, the real test comes down to creating a Windows Forms-based application in one of those languages, compiling it to MSIL, and running the resulting EXE file on the desired target platform, such as Linux or OS X. The Mono project is getting close to making that dream a reality.
The Mono project has tried at least three different approaches to implementing Windows Forms on Linux. The first implementation attempt tried to map Windows Forms to the Gtk toolkit. But that was an impedance mismatch. Trying to map equivalencies between two separate GUI toolkits didn't work well—and would have required an installation of Gtk+ on the target machine. The next attempt would have required the Wine Windows emulator. While that worked after a fashion, it was slow, buggy, and setting it up properly required many steps. This wasn't exactly the "copy a file over and run" scenario desired by most developers.
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ross-platform software development means different things to different people. For many programmers immersed in Microsoft languages such as VB.Net or C#, the real test comes down to creating a Windows Forms-based application in one of those languages, compiling it to MSIL, and running the resulting EXE file on the desired target platform, such as Linux or OS X. The Mono project is getting close to making that dream a reality.
