[KLUG Members] Tonight's Meeting: DEEP TECH: RAD With .Net & GNOME

[Adam Tauno Williams]

(Since the usual Friday reminder message didn't go out).

2004-05-11 - DEEP TECH: RAD With .Net & GNOME
 
The .Net platform is Microsoft's attempt to clean up APIs and
infrastructure developed over decades, and create a consistent
developement model and available set of functionality. GNOME is (or
perhaps was) the Open Source communities premiere attempt to do much the
same thing. With various (and often languishing) subsystems for
printing, rendering text, performing interprocess communication, etc....
developing complex and interrelated systems on UNIX/LINUX was just
really hard. See Miguel de Icaza's "Lets's Make UNIX Not Suck" for more
information on the philosophical underpinnings of GNOME.

So where does .Net fit into GNOME? Enter Mono. Mono is an Open Source
implementation of the .Net platform for UNIX and UNIX Like (Linux, BSD,
OS/X, etc...) platforms. This provides a consitent and robust platform
for development across a wide variety of systems, allowing the same
application to run on legacy Microsoft, UNIX and BSD systems, as well as
on the latest LINUX and OS/X boxes.

Mono makes is easy to develop advanced applications, including GUI
applications, that absorb a great deal of functionality from the
underlying system. In Mono (or .Net) the developer is free to focus on
the application rather than on how to accomplish routine and low-level
tasks. We will explain/demonstrate how simple it is with Mono and GNOME
to create a useful and user-friendly application.

NOTE: This is a technical presentation. Questions related to the
efficacy of using technology developed at Microsoft and the supposed
legal ramification of the Mono project will be routed directly to /dev/
null. I am not a lawyer and, as a point of fact, niether are the people
making an endless stink about this within the various Mono and GNOME
related forums. If you have questions about the legality of Mono please
retain a lawyer and instruct them to contact the legal department of
Novell or any of the other large institutions using and developing
Mono. 
 
Adam is a network administrator based in Grand Rapids, but the network
he deals with is all over Michigan, with a couple of hundred
workstations, running Linux and other Operating Systems. Not only does
he deal with domain issues at work, but he is also the owner of the
domain "whitemice.org". Adam has been a regular contributor to technical
discussions on our main mailing list, both presenting and solving some
of the most challenging networking and configuration problems.