eirler on i <a href="http://blog.lotas-smartman.net/archives/2004/04/02/1697/ms-and-sun-sign-broad-agreement/">posted about MS and Sun signing an historical agreement</a>. Well, some thoughs on the matter came to me while on the bus home. could this now mean that Microsoft could release a copy of the .NET CLR for Solaris, and maybe even Linux? and i meen a Microsoft supported version, with all MS languages, like <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic">Viaual Basic</a>, <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/csharp">C#</a>, <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio">etc</a>, not a <a href="http://www.go-mono.org">community supported copy like mono</a> which only really supports C# and is not fully compatible with what you would write in Visual Studio anyway, AFAIK.
I know <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3A1C93FA-7462-47D0-8E56-8DD34C6292F0&displaylang=en">microsoft have a Shared source copy of the CLR for FreeBSD and MacOSX, and Windows XP</a>, so maybe the code is in place. that Sharedsource copy was last updated on 11may (or 5 nov?) 2002 (11/5/2002). maybe there could be something.
it would be pretty sweet to wirte apps for linux, macosx, solaris, freebsd and windows all on one platform (VStuido) and one one machine/architecture (for me, i386). the CLR does the converting to other architectures, i think. just one more place for us VB Developers to see our apps running!
Ohhh, and if a microsoft CLR where released, the amount of extra ASP.NET sites poping up would be amazing! Linux/Apache systems could run it and, i read somewhere that it wasent till ASP.NET was released that developers realized how hard JSP actually was. im playing with ASP.NET and within about 20min had a webservice, 2 pages producing valid RSS2.0, a page creating OPML, and a few other pages up and running. an other 20min later my webservice was being consumed by an other page. and im just learning how ASP.NET works.
the idea is there. it could happen. it would be nice.