Paco comments about the Fort Worth .NET Users Group
I’ve been somewhat following the Mono project for a while now. Of course, since I’m a VB developer… I’ve not taken the plunge just yet since the VB side of things has been moving slowly (with little updates being said about the project). However, that’s not to say that they aren’t interested in getting the VB side of things done… as a matter of fact, the Mono project is 100% committed to doing so; just in a later version (1.2ish I believe). If what I’m saying seems to have nothing to do with the title of this entry, please bear with me ;-)
Francisco “Paco” Martinez, a contributer to the Mono project and the owner of the Gtk# Installer visited the Fort Worth .NET Users Group last week and spent some time talking to me about VB’s place in the Mono world. He even showed me a slick (simplistic) demo that definitely showed me there was serious promise in the future of Mono/VB. Basically, he opened Visual Studio .NET 2003, created a VB/Glade# project, used a custom designer to create a Gtk# windows form application (layout), double clicked on the item, added some code, compiled and executed the application on Windows XP. Rebooted the machine into Linux running Gnome… opened a console window, changed to the folder where the FortWorth.exe (the name of the executable created previously) file was located, and typed mono FortWorth.exe and that application ran as expected. Most impressive! Now, I’m not saying rush out and start developing with these technologies; just that the promise of being able to do so looks very good. Many of my applications today still leverage too many pieces that are only Windows specific (browser control, P/Invoke with Win32, etc.).
Now, time to get to the point of the title of this post ;-)…
Paco has written up a blurb about his visit to the group last week and thought that I’d share what he said to everyone here. So if haven’t visited the Fort Worth .NET Users Group and are wondering what to expect from a third party point of view… read on at Paco’s Blog. Also, you’ll find that he’s letting everyone know that we’re planning on bringing him in to speak at the beginning of next year on the subject somewhere along the lines of “Mono for the Microsoft .NET developer”.