Flutterby™! : C# and Windows.Forms on Linux

Yow! I sat down to do some basic exploratory stuff today, stuff that's to be targeted towards Windows and C#, and wondered if Mono was up to the task. After a few hours of diddling about with reading and manipulating data, parsing XML, that sort of thing, I started to think about needing a GUI. So I tried "using System.Windows.Forms", and a basic test app worked!

Slower than all get-out, but, hey, it's Microsoft designed, you'd expect that. I've been coding with a Windows box right beside me so that I can use the context sensitive help in Visual Studio to read the documentation, because Microsoft's class library design sucks big-time, but Emacs and a good Makefile makes a really nice development environment and alternative to the hell that is Visual Studio, and the fact that I can code up stuff with real tools in a real environment to analyze and transform data, and then later move it over to the crippled platform for massaging before delivery to the client, is great.

Definitely not a first choice, but deploying to Windows isn't a first choice, and if you've got to do that it's great to use a modern sophisticated well-tested development environment rather than starting out hobbled on Windows.