Mono 1.0 experiences

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

I just thought that I would make a few comments on the playing around with
Mono 1.0 (on Mac OS X 10.3.4) that I have been doing this week. 

Why Mono? Mono is the open source version of .Net with apparent support
for ASP.NET and database support (SQL Server, etc).

Mono v1.0 was officially released June 30 (http://www.go-mono.com) and
there are rpms for Linux, Windows installer (why) and a dmg for Macos X
(Panther). 

Tamas and I tested it with a toy client loading the WSDL from his name
resolver web service and it gave exactly the same answers as Windows .Net
based client. There is a utility for auto-generating the client stubs,
unimaginatively called wsdl.exe.

GUI support: On MacOS, it uses gtk+, which you have to setup with Fink -
this is a bit of a slog but instructions are included on the web site,
although contact me if you are going to do this on MacOS because they are
slightly wrong. I have just run the test programs (under X11) and the test
GUIs look fine.

ASP.NET support is *not* there for MacOS X: you need to build xsp (the
Mono ASP.NET container) and mod_mono (the Apache module to use this) and
both have killer bugs on MacOS - they will build/install OK but don't
work. There is a Bugzilla actively tracking this but anything which says
"load the latest version from CVS" should not be a 1.0 release.

	Cheers,

	Matthew