[Mono-dev] A significant number of Mono classes are not (binary) compatible with their .Net equivalents?

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> - regarding Mono, there are at least some +/- very usefull types
> concerned by the binary serialization compatibility. For these, may we
> propose our own versions (through the patch procedure)? 
> They are: DateTime, DataSet (but DataTable is fine), Decimal,
> DictionaryEntry, Dictionary<TK, TV> (that one for another reason),
> Queue<T>, Stack, Stack<T>, SortedList

If someone provides the patches, tests, and so on, it could be possible.

Simple types are probably trivial to do (the collections are very simple
classes, so I do not expect it to be too hard).   But more complex
things like DateTime, DataSet could require a lot of work, and its just
not a good idea to change that code.

> Finally, even if I fully understand why Mono developpers do not access
> Net sources (even through Reflector), the situation is quite
> regrettable for the difficulties it creates as soon as systems work in
> a heterogeneous environment (.Net+Windows and Mono+Linux). Does anyone
> know how Java is for this?

It was a mistake in Microsoft's parts on the first place to do
serialization based on internal fields (as they discovered later on).
They basically introduced the equivalent of an API, without documenting
it.   Poor decision making on that one.