I didn’t get a chance to blog this last night … this was the last session that I attended Tuesday.
I spent a little time in the lab since this session was marked as full
… I was on the waiting list. I ended up at the room about 30
minutes after it started and got in anyhow. As I walked in I saw Calvin Gaisford
from Novell. I had worked with Calvin at Novell and he is a great
guy … and extremely talented. He gets it. He bailed to
Caldera when things sucked at Novell, and went back a year or so
later. He’s very much involved with the iFolder project, and is working with Mono.
Just as I got in the room, one of the people at a PC got up and left
… I had sat next to him in the morning … he saw me standing in the
back and offered his PC to me. Jackpot!
I flipped through the slides, which were a good overview of the
.NET architecture, and then got caught up to the development
projects. Again … I’m impressed. I worked through the
first couple of exercises, and then got to the Glade
development. Glade is an awesome tool that I found a long time
ago in Linux … it allows you to rapidly build the UI framework that
you later add code to. Mono has implemented libraries so that you
can now use Glade to create your UI, and then add the C# (or VB?) code
later. GUI apps in GNOME, on UNIX or Linux, written in C# or
VB. Amazing …
Ease of application development on any platform, IMHO, is key to
success. And these guys are moving rapidly to provide a full –
modern – development environment with rich tools for the creation of
these applications. Mono rocks!
During the session the speaker introduced the “crowd” in the back of
the room … Erik the PM, Miguel the leader, Calvin of iFolder,
etc. I wanted to get a chance to meet Miguel and chat with him
… when I completed the development exercises I turned around and they
had left. Bummer.
Anyhow … I can’t wait to continue to explore development with Glade
and Mono … I want to see how quickly the progress with VB
occurs. IMHO, VB is a *huge* with for UNIX and Linux when Mono
supports it … there are a *lot* of VB developers out there.
The Mono sessions alone made the conference worthwhile!