[sword-devel] Porting to MS .NET framework

[John Baima]

At 07:07 PM 6/5/2003 -0400, David wrote:
>One of the things you will find within the opensource community
>is a large resistance to being told what tools to use.


Right. That is one of the reasons that Mono has become one of the most 
successful open source projects. Once you have the .NET Framework (which 
does not need anything Microsoft), besides the free Microsoft C# compiler, 
and the Microsoft Visual C++, Visual Basic, Jscript languages, you have 
several third-party languages ported or being ported to .NET including 
Delphi, Eiffel, Cobol, APL, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, as well as research 
languages such as Haskell, ML, Oberon, Scheme and Mercury. You can create 
objects in any language and use them in any other. That's freedom!

Yes, the main drawback for .NET is that it is forward looking. Any platform 
that never got a Java VM probably won't get a .NET Framework. Virtually 
everything else will.

Think about how much development effort is spent on UI issues for Sword. In 
.NET, any visual component in any language can be used in any other. With 
.NET the UI effort would be pooled and reused, not reinvented several times 
over. What can take you into the future and give the best software for the 
most people? Anyway, I would encourage people to do some reading about .NET 
and make up their own mind. I will now get off my soapbox :-)

-John