[Mono-dev] Moonlight for Win/Mac as a cross platform desktop

[Joe Dluzen]

I always expected and hoped that Moonlight desktop would take off. It
always seemed like the most logical route. 99% (if not 100%) of your
code (including GUI code!) would target Silverlight/Moonlight 4, and
suddenly your app now runs on Windows Phone, Symbian, Xbox 360 (soon),
Windows, Mac, and Linux in the browser as well as out of browser. On
Linux OOB, you could even have the full runtime available. Microsoft
even lists Moonlight on their Silverlight page under system
requirements. Android demos of Moonlight have also been shown.

Ian Norton has been working on just this sort of thing:
https://github.com/inorton/MoonBase, though it seems to depend on GTK#
in some fashion, it most likely doesn't need the entire suite of libs.
Maybe we could isolate only what is needed (not using the Mono linker
I mean).

While Xamarin is busy in ARM land, I would hope that they could spend
just a bit of time and get the Moonlight trunk in a nice easy-to-build
state. Perhaps some ready-to-integrate static/shared libs too...

Stefan, are you able to target Silverlight 4 OOB? That should take
care of Windows and Mac desktop.

Joe

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 16:04:36 +0000
> From: Stefan Dobrev <Stefan.Dobrev at telerik.com>
> Subject:
>        application platform
> To: "mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com"
>        <mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>
> Message-ID:
>        <AC2D0E1B18C6E54F925C08CB20BBDE1B0AC4E0 at EXCHBG02.telerik.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Hi guys,
>
> I know about your current vision that developers should use the native UI toolkit for the platform that they are targeting, but nevertheless I want to bring this question up. Are there any plans to support Moonlight as a cross platform desktop application platform for Windows/Mac? If so what resources should be delegated to implement the basics of the Windows part for example?
>
> I know that this may sound crazy, but feel free to express your wild ideas and shoot in the dark
>
> -sdobrev
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