Scott Hanselman has put up a podcast of an interview with a long time Mono developer from Novel. Really interesting stuff. It talks about Mono branching off from .NET in some areas, such as System.IO, to get round bugs in the .NET API implementation. But that means your code will only run on unix, so what’s the point of using Mono? Well, Mono has a clever IO abstraction layer that defaults to the unix version when you’re not running on Windows.

We might be using DekiWiki at $WORK, which uses Mono, so the podcast is rather interesting for me. I’ve linked to .NET purity myth article mentioned in the podcast here.

What a blast from the past. That’s the trouble with going back to something you haven’t done in years, in this case COM programming and exporting functions from DLLs in particular. You hit problems you solved a long time ago and have to dredge up the answer again. I want to keep the COM stuff out of the way so I’ve bunged it in a DLL and exported a function:

extern "C" GADFLY_API bool CreateUser(LPSTR, LPSTR); (more...)