I am still so frustrated that Mono got lambasted for being a M$ trap. It was the biggest FUD I have ever read. Hope to see mono return to use in Linux community again.
The nix world never suffered from lack of decent languages, compilers, development tools, ecosystems and runtimes. The only benefit Mono gives nix users is to write software that's easy to run on Windows and that barely registers on most priority lists. It's been, IIRC, 6 years since I last wrote a "real" desktop app. I did it in C#, but Mono couldn't run it because it relied on Windows-only GUI components. Happily, it was never intended to be deployed on non-Windows environments and everyone was happy.
If I needed to write a desktop application (that's so 90's) that runs identically on both Windows and Linux, I'll just write it in Java.
I wonder how much of the mobile market cross-platform toolkits have. I've used Titanium, but only for exceedingly simple apps. Anything else is done with the native tools. I know there are apps that require complex device-side logic but, most of the time (at least for me), almost all of the logic runs on a server and all that's left is user interface management.
Agreed, it was disappointing. There were some trust issues surrounding Mono but also an excessive amount of hyperbole.
A real shame, as Mono is great technology with good GTK bindings and integrated well with the GNOME system. I think having Mono as a first-class GNOME environment would have been interesting.
I've spent the past week using Monodevelop and F# to develop compiler tools under Fedora and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Not to mention F# is well supported within IDE, almost equal to VS.
I'm a lot less optimist, I think it will just focus Mono development on the mobile platforms (Xamarin on Android/iOS) but will do nothing good for desktop or server use.
How is that a reasonable conclusion? Microsoft has a new CEO. It's an unpredictable situation where anything could happen. Betting your business on perceived, not even openly stated, marketing suggestions at this time seems overly risky.
So baking in Xamarin as a compile target in Visual Studio. Conciously changing their licensing terms of various BCL NuGet packages to allow their unrestricted use on Xamarin/Mono platforms... yeah, there's clearly no hints at all as to what they're up to.
