[Mono-list] Using Mono on linux and deploying to Windows

Tue Oct 2 10:56:17 EDT 2007

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>Thanks for that info. So, just to clarify:
>WPF/e is different to WPF. The first is Silverlight, the second 
>is a fat client.

Correct

>Neither GTK# nor WPF is particularly more able to be deployed in
>Silverlight/Moonlight. They are both intended for desktop apps and 
>neither is a universal framework.

Yes, but the underlying Framework is the .NET Framework.
Silverlight/Moonlight are getting a much scaled-down version of the .NET
Framework and that's why they can't support the full WPF.

>As such, the choice between GTK# and WPF would be on their relative 
>merits for desktop applications.

Yes

>Given that, it may be somewhat pointless to use .NET. I might as well 
>use regular CPython with GTK. I won't get a web application for free 
>by using .NET and I might as well minimise my pain. 

Yes and No. The .NET formula definitely has a higher learning curve but
it brings a lot of things with it and gives you a much stronger
application in the end that is more scalable and easier to maintain. But
you have to master the learning curve before you can enjoy most of the
benefits.

The idea of getting a "web application for free" is something we'd all
love to see someday. Intraweb for Delphi was the closest I've ever seen
to having the desktop design metaphor in a web application but it never
caught on because it didn't fully support the web metaphor - you were
"in a box" and you could do a lot of things but it was difficult to
handle those cases where you wanted to do something that wasn't baked
in.

Scripting technologies (php, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc) have a much
simpler learning curve but the code you end up with can be difficult to
maintain if it wasn't designed well. That isn't a fault of the scripting
languages themselves, but rather is a side-effect of self-taught web
developers who don't have a lot of application design skills. I'm not
knocking self-taught developers by the way - I love their motivation and
ability to conquer new ground. I'd hire any of them in the right
situation.

>That said, .NET with IronPython and GTK# might be a better desktop
>framework than CPython and GTK, but that's a different question.

Keep in mind that the .NET Framework is the common denominator between
IronPython, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, WPF, Silverlight/Moonlight,
etc. If you learn the basic .NET Framework for a fat client application
then some of those same skills can be helpful with .NET on the web. But
there is more to learn in that case.

By the way, someone said that IronPython was available for Silverlight.
That's very impressive. I'm afraid I missed that news before this
mention and I'm sorry if I misled you. I have played with "conventional
Python" in the past and I may indeed have to look into IronPython.

Eric

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