By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
I recently read that Microsoft is thinking about porting .NET to Mac OS X. As a developer, I think this would be awesome if they did. I use .NET at work now when I can not use ColdFusion. James Gosling, the inventor of Java, recently criticized .net and some other non-java technologies in a speech he gave. One of his criticisms about .NET is that Microsoft missed an opportunity by not being trully cross-platform.
The Mono project has already crossed some these cross platform issues by supporting Linux and the Mac OS.
Microsoft would have some technical hurdles to overcome to port .NET to the Mac. One of those would be their reliance on parts of the framework that use COM still. Much of that has been fixed now in .NET 2.0. Another issue would be porting Windows Forms so that it maintains the Mac look and feel. But I think it can be done.
As a Mac developer and a .NET developer, I hope Microsofts does port .NET to the Mac. This is the one area where Java has shined over .NET is cross platform development.
Now if we could convince Microsoft to port .NET to Linux. I am not holding my breath for that one.