Mono at ReMIX: No Moonlight incarnation of WPF planned
Miguel de Icaza, vice president of engineering at Novell and chief of the Mono Project, said at Microsoft's ReMIX 2007 conference that the Moonlight 1.0 code needs performance improvements, bug fixes and a better installation but is fairly mature, feature complete and will ship within six months. The follow-on version with .NET support will be available roughly six months to a year after Microsoft's Silverlight 1.1 update ships.
But when asked by one attendee at Microsoft's ReMIX 2007 conference if the Mono project plans a full implementation of WPF, he wavered.
"It's a good question and a politically charged one. I don't know," de Icaza said, citing a number of issues that would make the task daunting. "[WPF] is too big. It's a gigantic thing and Silverlight is inspired by it but [Silverlight] is understandable. WPF is not on that level. It's incredibly complicated so I'm hesitant to say we're going to do it. I don't want to give people false hope."
Regardless of his opinion, several Mono developers have already begun the work on WPF and an open source incarnation of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA tool for Linux, Unix, Solaris and BSD may come to fruition, he acknowledged. "Only WCF is in progress, but eventually we'll do it," de Icaza said of WPF at his ReMIX 07 session.
Microsoft announced availability of Silverlight 1.0 in early September and at that time announced a partnership with the Novell-sponsored Mono project to bring Silverlight 1.0 to Linux. The so called Moonlight project is now four months old, based on C+, and will be available as a control or as front end that plugs into Mozilla Firefox.
But all eyes are on Microsoft's full fledged Silverlight 1.1, which incorporates support for the .NET Framework. Version 1.1 is in now testing and due for release in the summer of 2008. Silverlight 1.1, for example, will extend support to .NET including ASP.NET AJAX and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) language, cross-platform debugging capabilities and suppot for JavaScript, Visual Basic, Python and Ruby.
De Icaza said Moonlight 1.1 will follow six month to a year behind Silverlight 1.1 -- arriving perhaps in 2009 -- because the coding changes between Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1 are substantial.
Meanwhile, the core Mono project is "pretty complete" when compared to .NET 3.0, de Icaza said, noitng that the C#, LINQ and X-LINQ implementations are done but Windows Forms 2.0 support is not finished.