[Mono-devel-list] Can I use Microsoft's DLL's on the Win32 platform?

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> My hope is to use kick-ass Mono features (such as the SSA optimizations, 
> "--aot", "mkbundle", etc.) with standard Visual Studio projects, which 
> you'd think would be very attractive.  More importantly, Win32 offers a 
> vast array of libraries that may be unsupported by Mono for a long time, so 
> in a sense, this is a mandatory requirement for Win32 developers who aren't 
> hindered by portability concerns.

You wont be able to assemblies that come from the .NET framework with
Mono.

Many of these assemblies use internal calls to the virtual machine, and
are hence non-portable or use COM which is not supported by Mono.

Third party libraries will work, but you need to look at its
dependencies on a case-by-case basis.