I am routinely asked if the Digipede Network can run under Mono.  The main scenario people want is to run Digipede Agents on a mix of Windows and Linux boxes.

My answer has always been the same:

Not now, maybe never, but this would not be technically challenging.

A while back we researched what it would take to get the Digipede Agent working on Linux.  At the time, the Mono project was less mature.  Finding out what worked was mostly a game of just trying it.  We eventually gave up, because a dependency on WSE2 turned out to be a blocker.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to see what it would take to finish this task.  I haven’t paid much attention to the Mono project over the years, but Moonlight gave me hope that Mono has made a lot of advances since we tried last.

It has.  Still using Visual Studio, I #ifdef’ed out a few noncompliant functions and got it working with the Mono runtime.  It was surprisingly easy.  Kudos to Miguel de Icaza, Novell, and the Mono team. 

So now I have it working in the lab on a Linux VM.  Checking in to a Digipede Server, it is able to run our .NET development patterns.  Of course, it can also run command-line applications with Linux-specific binaries.  Pretty cool.

This is not ready for release.  Not only is a supported product more than just bits, but I took a few shortcuts in getting the bits to work! 

Now if someone asks me if it Digipede Network can run under Mono, I can say

It does in the lab, it may never get released, and this is ultimately a market and product decision. 

So now we can do it, what shall we do with it?