alt.mono

In 2007 David Laribee coined the term "ALT.NET", giving a constantly growing community a name. ALT.NET is about beeing passionated about software development and about finding new ways to build better software.

ALT.NET shouldn't be reduced to a set of tools and frameworks, but there are some Open Source tools in the .NET-world that have a strong relation to ALT.NET. They started off to be an alternative to mainstream .NET development, trying to improve software development and maintenance.

Many of these frameworks and tools are widely used in the Microsoft .NET world, and they surely made my life as a software developer much easier. As an enthusiastic Linux user and Debian developer, I would like to use these tools and frameworks on the Mono platform as well.

While this shouldn't generally be so hard, there are some stumbling blocks and quirks, to port a framework from Microsoft.NET to Mono. This can be OS-related issues (backslash vs. forward slash), localization issues, bugs or missing features in Mono or simply the lack of a working build script.

This is, where alt.mono is brought into the play. alt.mono offers a project management platform and a home for Open Source frameworks and tools migrated from Microsoft .Net to Mono.

The goal is, to deliver ready-to-be-used packages for Mono, support them, improve them and contribute back to the upstream developers and to Mono.

As a Debian developer, my main goal is to make these packages suitable for Debian, but every distribution maintainer is welcome to pick the packages up on alt.mono and package them for his distribution.

Right now work is going on to make StructureMap, DynamicProxy2 and RhinoMocks suitable for Mono. If this works out well, NHibernate will be the next candidate.

Any help is welcome!

Thanks to DomainBox for sponsoring this server!