[Mono-dev] Mono on wine redux

[Dan Kegel]

As http://www.mono-project.com/WinForms and
http://www.winehq.org/?issue=230#Mono%20Ditching%20Wine
explain, Mono ditched Wine about four years ago
for some very good reasons, and has been happily
making progress on its own without worrying about Wine.

In those four years, Wine has matured to the point
where it is now just starting to run nontrivial .net 2 apps using
Microsoft's .net 2 runtime package ( see
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2008-April/064614.html ).
It even has a fairly capable implementation of gdiplus.

For the moment, Wine is happy to let people choose
between Mono and MS .Net.  Since most .net apps are
built with Microsoft tools, they're nearly universally mixed-
mode assemblies, so people will of neccessity load MS .net
runtimes onto Wine.  Eventually, though, we'd
like to start herding everybody towards Mono, as
machines without Windows licenses become more common,
and Microsoft stops allowing ISVs to bundle the .net runtime
with their apps.

That would require adding support for mixed-mode assemblies
to the Windows version of Mono.  I don't know how big a job
that is, but I bet it'd be a fun project for the right intern to take a
whack at.  (Anyone interested?)

Cheers,
Dan Kegel
Wine 1.0 Release Manager