Let me just say that I am pretty impressed by what Miguel De Icaza and the other Mono guys have accomplished by creating Mono.

I have never been impressed by Linux and I am not surprised by the slower than expected adoption of the operating system, despite huge efforts by Novell and Red Hat. To me, the main reason is the lack of standardization in the different distributions. Setting up and configuring a Linux system is never the same. Different vendors use different front-ends (Gnome vs KDE), the file systems are organized differently, boot procedures are totally different, ...

But, I have always been intrigued by Mono, the .NET platform for Linux which is "sponsored" by Novell. Mono has always been pretty up-to-date by implementing new .NET stuff and compiler features as soon as (or sometimes even sooner than) Microsoft made them publicly available

I was a little curious to see how ProMesh.NET (MVC Web Framework for .NET 2.0) would run on Mono (if at all), so I did the following:

• Download the VMWare image with a pre-installed Mono installation on SUSE Linux 10.2
• Download VMPlayer (free)
• Copied the latest ProMesh.NET source tree to the virtual machine
• Fired up MonoDevelop
• Compiled the framework... Works (well, it compiled)
• Copied the ProMesh.NET demo application to the virtual machine
• Compiled the demo app... Works!
• Started xsp2.exe (the lightweight .NET web server for Mono)
• Opened the index.ashx page using FireFox: WORKS
• Went through the complete demo site. Everything worked!

I was utterly amazed by the painless process of compiling and running a ProMesh.NET application on Mono, something I've never tried before (I did have some previous experience with MonoDevelop, but not a lot).

This is pretty exciting stuff, knowing you can just grab your ProMesh.NET web application, dump it on a Linux box and run it from a Linux web server.

Mono team: good job!!

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