On 11/12/05, Kai Ponte
On Friday 11 November 2005 11:23 am, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
There seems to be a misconception that the CLI, C#, and C++/CLI are owned by Microsoft. This is not, AFAIK, the case. These are ECMA standards. Among the contributors to these standardization efforts is Novell Inc. This site has some links to the official specs: http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~sestoft/ecma/
Yes, the C# and CLI were submitted to the ECMA back in '01 or '02, fairly soon after they announced .net. They hoped that someone like Miguel would come along and write a competing product to VS.net so that they could say it was an "open" standard.
I'm actually using this information in my arguments at work as to why we should move from VB to C# (as opposed to moving to VB.NET). I have been patiently explaining that we could leverage the C# to run on our new mainframe (IBM z890) as back end or middleware while running C# clients on the desktops (mostly running Windows).
This is something we (the team I am working with) are currently evaluating. The Mono platform has proven to be quite stable and most of our server-side components (.NET Remoting, no COM/DCOM here) have successfully been ported to Mono running on a SuSE 9.2 system. Except for the applications relying on web services we are very optimistic to be able to offer some of our products by the end of Q2 2006 as an alternative to Windows based environments. \Steve