[Mono-winforms-list] Kudos Called For

[Jerry Houston]

I'm a long-time Win32 veteran who's been working as a
winform/webservice/tools developer since .NET 1.0.  My company adopted
the new paradigm and the C# language for our flagship product
development back when a lot of folks couldn't even spell .NET, let alone
know what it was, and I've been at it full-time for six years now.

When I first heard about mono, I loved the idea of an OS implementation,
but after checking in on its progress from time to time, I got the
feeling that it wasn't going anywhere very fast.  I figured that someday
mono might be useful for writing Linux console apps, using the GNU
equivalent of Microsoft's command-line compiler, but I didn't really
hope to see much more than that.

With vacation time on my hands, and a newly-built x64 system running
openSuSE 10.3 to play with at home, I decided to take another look, and
I have to say that I'm amazed.  Truly amazed. 

I decided to check it out with a fairly substantial winform application
called TimeLine, that I wrote to keep track of time spent on tasks at
work and submit weekly reports to a supervisor.   It's not a trivial
application.  I simply copied the solution from my XP-Pro workstation to
a Samba share on my Linux machine (I didn't have remote cvs set up yet),
told monoDevelop to "build solution," and damned if it didn't build
as-is.  And then my application RAN, with only a trivial adjustment
needed to make it perfect.

So congratulations to everyone here who had anything to do with getting
this all to the state where it is today!  I look forward to becoming
personally active in OS development in the coming years -- something
that never really interested me much before now.

Regards,

    Jerry Houston
    Vertafore Corporation
    Bothell, WA