I’ve just back from at two day seminar on Delphi 8 and ADO.NET

I spend the last couple of hours playing with a couple of things:

Mono:
Mono is an Open Source Software (OSS) .NET platform. It basicly does the same as MS’s .net runtime but will run on win32, Linux, Mac OS X and the following CPUs x86-32, PPC, Sparc, strongArm, HPPA, s390 (some of them as inteprenter).

The windows.forms assembli isn’t stable which is a very, very big minus, but they are working on it. When this works, most .net applications can run on the above platforms with little or no change!

Read more her:
About 1.0 (current)
Roadmap (also has some interesting info on .NET 2.0)

SharpDevelop (Windows)
MonoDevelop (Linux/Max OSX)The
same thing but for different platforms. An OSS IDE for development of .net applications in either C# og BV.NET. Looks like Visual Studio or Delphi – so if you want to try your hand at .NET or C# development without having to buy a n expensive package, this could be it.
Feature list.

I tried to develop a small hello world application (form based) with SharpDevelop and it worked fine when run in .net, but crashed (with at nice error message) when run in mono. Then I made a small console based application and that ran fine in both .net and mono, which is quite cool. The implications of this is quite fantastic. When they really get windows.forms to work, it will be a piece of cake to make cross platform applications. It’s the promise of Java – write once, run anywhere, but this time it may actaully work.