[Mono-osx] Delphi Prism and all those Cocoa bridges

[marc hoffman]

Andrew,

> I find Delphi more convincing every time I read about it! Ever since
> the .NET Rocks podcast episode about Prism I was sort of hooked.

glad to hear that. i believe we have a lot of cool stuff in Prism that  
sets it apart from C# - not just it's support for Mono(objc). For  
example, have a look at our upcoming support for AOP: http://blogs.remobjects.com/blogs/mh/2009/02/06/p253 
  (shows on an example that's very relevant to Monobjc, too ;)

> http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=409
>
> But you know the episode, you were in it! :-)
>
> (Wie geht's so in Berlin?)

cold ;)

>> Matter of fact, we're moving towards recommending Monobjc as the
>> "recommended" way to do Cocoa apps in Prism (i know, the mobjc and
>> NSWhatever guys will come in to complain that thier stuff is  
>> better ;-).
>> When i spoke to Geoff at PDC he also recommended Monobjc as the most
>> complete and best solution to work with.
>
> I think we are getting somewhere.
>
> I am looking for a way to write applications that are portable between
> Windows and Mac OS X, ideally use Cocoa, and are garbage-collected.

very doable, yes. one of the things i was thinking about just today  
was doing a nice sample that (aided by a variation of the Aspect i  
describe in the blog post above) would show an application that has a  
WPB MVVM and a Monobjc Cocoa frontend both based on the same  
modelview. (The aspect would publish the properties according to KVO  
when using Monobjc, and as bindable properties for WPF, when using  
that...

>> i'd love to see this happen and have all the different fronts that  
>> people
>> are working n for Obj-C/Mono bridging to be united. Mono/OS X  
>> development is
>> a tiny niche of Mono usage in general, as it stands now (as much as  
>> i'd love
>> that to change),
>
> I am sure it will change. I think there is a positively huge market
> for decent cross-platform applications.

i believe so too, yes.

> I'd be content with a Visual Studio plug-in that supports Mono and
> Monobjc. But I am willing to spend money and learn Delphi if this is
> the best way for me to get what I want. I liked Turbo Pascal.

inside VS, i dare say that is the best option, yes. Until we can ship  
our MD support...


yours,
marc