FWDNUG Mono Presentation

Tonight I had one of those I-wish-I-could-spend-more-time-playing-with-Mono moments. Paco Martinez (his blog is here), a Mono contributor, gave a very interesting presentation to FWDNUG tonight (on Mono, of course). It was an hour and a half drive for me, but it was worth it.

Highlights? Here are a few. First, he explained how the two stacks of Mono. As any of you who are familiar with the project know, Mono is built off of the .NET standards submitted to ECMA. Everything there is free for them to implement with no real fear of possible lawsuit. On top of that, though, they have two different "stacks", or library sets. The first set includes Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET. The other set includes libraries from the non-Microsoft world (GTK, a Novell library, etc.). This is to protect them in the case of someone raising the issues of legality. If such appears, they would have a large set of libraries to use that could not be affected. Smart thinking.

Second, I really enjoyed how he showed us that code compiled on Windows ran on Linux. Mono/Microsoft .NET code (C#, VB.NET, whatever) is compiled to IL (Intermediate Language). The Mono and Microsoft compilers output compatible IL, which means that an exe or dll compiled on Windows can be brought directly into the Linux environment and ran, without any extra compilation. I really thought that was cool. He said he was going to bring a Mac to the PDNUG meeting in March. I'm looking forward to that.

Third, I'm just glad I got to meet him. I really enjoy meeting people in the blogosphere, especially when they work on such cool stuff! Enjoyed it and looking forward to March.

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