Just a little post for all these people who seem to think Mono is just an other short-term open-source software.

I’ve used it for quite some time with a production “real time” network server, which is running for something like 6 months now, and it performs very well. I do everything on my Windows host and then copy and launch the final app on the Linux host. But there are still two problems :

  • Not all .Net classes are supported. WCF (the most powerfull to do two-way async/sync communication) isn’t one of them.
  • You can’t use the powerfull Visual Studio debugger and you can’t take advantage of the PDB files (as they are not compatibles with mono).

Well, the Mono team has solved this second problem with their Mono Tools for Visual Studio. I have already applied twice and haven’t received any inivitation for the private mono tools tryout. But I guess it will be released to the public pretty soon (within 6 months). The mono guys are working really fast (but not as fast as the Microsoft .Net development team).

Sometimes people should just consider using Mono for their (web) applications. In my opinion, an ASP.Net + DataBase Linux server is faster to manage than a equivalent Windows Server. It doesn’t slow down with uptime, it doesn’t have dozens of useless services, it doesn’t require to restart for updates and real problems are way easier to diagnose.

The real limitation for me are the super Microsoft APIs and tools like WCF, LinQ, SQL Server 2008 (with its Integration and Analysis services) that you can only run on Windows.