Fascinating article in The Register today about how Miguel de Icaza wants to port GNOME to .NET, and generally make this the platform of the future. It's fascinating to hear this, and has some relevance to our own project, Jtrix.

.NET is about SOAP and it's about portable bundles of code ("assemblies"). Jtrix is still about a lot more than that, but it's good to hear someone recognise .NET's assemblies. I don't know too much about them, but from what MdI says their security features are much like setting Java's security policies. These work fine for Java applets, but I can see this being quite inadequate for practical purposes, and one will end up enabling all features because application-style programs (as opposed to applet style programs) need them. And then your system is compromised.

Additionally, I can see that all useful Windows applications will be platform-specific by addressing memory direct. .NET allows this and it will render a Linux MONO less useful than one would like. James Gosling noted this some time ago in an interview with News.com.

Jtrix runs everything in its own code space, and resources (e.g. disk) are kept entirely separate. Its aim is allow you to use your own PC as a commercial hosting environment. You need complete security for that. So it's nice to see people recognise the general idea, but it's a shame to see them focus their attention on what is, IMHO, a misguided direction.