Will the monkey ever catch up?
Disclaimer (as if I need it): Although the following may sound like a rant, it is *not* a rant.
A few weeks ago I heard that Mono’s ASP.NET implementation is considered feature complete, which is great news. But Microsoft’s ASP.NET implementation is out since Feb. 2002, which means the ASP.NET team is working on v2.0 since -approximately- two years now. This looks like a considerable gap to me. I mean… while coding M1 of Mono’s ASP.NET Whidbey has just started, Microsoft is about to publicly launch Whidbey first beta; can you see the gap now?
While I was writing an article about ASP.NET Whidbey’s WebResource feature I decided to take a quick look at Mono’s Whidbey code to see how they were implementing this feature and possibly comment about it in the article. Nothing ever made into it because there was only a skeleton AssemblyResourceLoader.cs file with an ultrasimple implementation that wasn’t worth mentioning (it was missing key features like caching, security, ect). This, by the way, is totally understandable as Mono work on Whidbey has just started but I’m citing this just as practical example that a (considerable) gap exists.
To get an idea of when the Mono team plans to release an ASP.NET Whidbey implementation you can look at their roadmap. Scrolling down to title “Mono 1.2” you can read things like “…ASP.NET 2.0 improvements…” and “…This release will by default provide .NET 1.2 APIs...”. It is pretty clear by now that the next Mono version (v1.2) will try to provide the same feature set as Microsoft’s Whidbey (currently named version 1.2 and probably renamed to version 2.0).
No very big surprises up to here. When this Mono v1.2 will be available? The roadmap says “…Release target: Q4/2004…”. Ex-cu-se me?!, do you mean the fourth quarter of 2004?!, one year or less from now?! Wow… now that’s just sounds like an impossible goal. Want to bet?
And lastly… why in the world isn’t the Mono Official Website running on Mono’s ASP.NET? Is it just that they don’t like to eat their own dog food?
