Going With Mono
I made a little forum post a day or two ago expressing my interest in getting into development with Mono. Seeing as it's protected under Microsoft's Community Promise, it seems like a good deal to me. Easily portable, you can bind it to several different toolkits, and most importantly (for me):
MOONLIGHT DEVELOPMENT!
It seems like an odd thing to swoon over. However, consider the possibilities:
-Moonlight is an Open Source implementation to Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. What does Flash have in the FOSS world? Gnash and swfdec, admittedly both crap in my opinion. Adobe doesn't want to open up the code for it, so the FOSS community is constantly lagging behind. Oh joy! While it's definitely true that Moonlight 2.0 is incomplete for now, and many sites don't deploy Silverlight as of yet, it's a very promising series of frameworks. Moonlight is developing at a far more rapid rate.
-Since Moonlight is completely open, an upcoming feature is that there will be plugins for developing Moonlight applications in the MonoDevelop IDE. Holy fuck, think about that. That means two kinds of applicaions: web, and desktop. You have a cross-platform IDE and runtime for desktop and web applications that require a single framework? And the FOSS community isn't fully adopting it?
-An upcoming feature is that Moonlight will be capable of being used to create interfaces on desktop applications using Mono. So, suddenly a media/web framework can be used to spruce up the toolkits of the applications using it...like, oh, Qt# and GTK#. Couple that with something like Clutter, and you're in for a fucking treat.
-Just about everything has bindings to C# right now. Imagine for a moment that someone used the C# bindings of Webkit, and used Moonlight to draw a slick interface as well as a functional web browser. It's increasingly becoming a possibility.
-And Paint.NET is being ported over somewhat! And maybe some day Adventure Game Studio will, too.
I don't know why I avoided it all this time. Mono is becoming truly flexible, and in my opinion really has something great going for it. I really like MonoDevelop as an IDE, seems quite powerful from what I've done with it already. I'm scouring the web for tutorials. Of course, some people will try and ruin it for the rest of us.
But you know what? Fuck 'em.