Enterprises Don’t Catch Mono
Why Mono isn’t spreading inside the corporate world
October 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Matt Hargett hates it when a bug is resurrected. So, when he started fiddling with Mono to help move his company’s Windows-based vulnerability scanner onto Linux, he was frustrated to see some bugs vanish in one build, only to reappear in the next.
Because of that, Hargett isn’t convinced that Mono, the open-source .NET Framework project sponsored by Novell, would be a good choice for his next project. It would appear that enterprise developers agree. According to the 2006 .NET Development Study, conducted by BZ Research in September, only 3.6 percent of enterprise development managers said they were currently using Mono, and 4.8 percent said they were targeting it for new or migrated applications.
Those numbers are borne out by Michael Goulde’s experiences in speaking to enterprise developers as well. Goulde is an analyst at Forrester Research, and he’s not convinced that there’s much call for Mono in the enterprise thus far.
Goulde said that the server-side code of Mono is still not ready for prime time. “I think a lot of their energy has gone into the client side, so the potential for how many people out there who it would be relevant to starts to get really small. You’re looking at people who have both Windows and Linux on their desktops, who have stand-alone applications. Whereas if you’re asking questions about Java and Java frameworks, those are largely being used on the server,” said Goulde.
Another reason for the lack of uptake, said Hargett, is a dearth of automated unit tests in Mono. He said that in his experience, new versions of Mono often break former compatibilities, and even reintroduce long-dead bugs. “On their C# compiler and on the Mono runtime itself, they do a really good job of [testing],” said Hargett, who has since left his former employer and is now an Extreme Programming consultant at Pivotal Computer Systems.
“But as far as other pieces, like the ASP.NET compiler and the Windows Forms stuff, unfortunately, while it’s always getting better, it’s not always moving forward,” added Hargett. “They’ll fix a bug and it will [later] become unfixed. Until they fix these things, I wouldn’t recommend anyone use Mono for deploying Windows Forms or ASP.NET applications.”
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