Last night I had a few minutes to spare, so I decided to try something new. I wrote a C# program. Nothing big...just a tiny bit more than "Hello World". Then, just for kicks, I ported my little program to VB.NET. I know...it's not a big deal. It's just over a dozen lines of code (7 lines for each version) that you may've written. But they represent my first .NET experience.
But here's the cool part: I did all of this on my Mac Powerbook. I've known about Mono for awhile, but just haven't taken the time to try it out until last night. Even though my project was quite trivial, I must say that I'm impressed so far. What blew my mind is that the artifact generated by the compiler was a .EXE file. Could it be...? Yep, I copied that .EXE file over to my wife's WinXP machine and it ran like any other Windows program.
Lest you think that I'm abandoning all of the good that is Java, my main reason for installing Mono is actually Spring-related. I've been wanting give Spring.NET a spin for awhile, but since I'm a Mac user I haven't had a platform to try it out on.
My Spring.NET experience? Well, I've downloaded it, but I've not yet opened it up. I wanted to get my feet wet with some simple .NET stuff first before I threw Spring into the mix. But stay tuned. I'll likely post some Spring.NET stuff here once I have something to share.
