My laptop is the IT standard bastardized version of XP so I can run outlook. Though perhaps it'd be easier to crack it open, up the RAM, and run ubuntu in a VM on it..
Holy crap, you need to get out more if you think that the Bay area is somehow magical because you can have a variety of foods, work with smart people and take day trips to fun place.
I live and work here and frankly its no better or worse than many other places I've lived or worked.
I lead a dev team in the real world, using mono for all our work, and I don't need them to do any such thing. Your definition of the "ONLY" goal for them is utter claptrap and certainly not a definition of what the "real world needs".
Stop confusing your desires ("Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy") with the only sane direction for them to go.
I certainly wouldn't thank them for slavishly copying .net 1.1 or any such thing. If you want that so badly, feel free to submit patches, I'm sure they'll gladly accept.
I have never programmed with .NET (been coding exclusively in linux for years), but the framework looks interesting and the WPF has caught my eye. I will probably be one of those who will be exclusively learning the mono version of the .NET story and C#/F#. Though I guess there are very few people in my boat.
i also use mono on ubuntu. if the scope is larger than what i want to do in a scripting language, like bash, then i use c#. it's a great language. i have my eye on mvc support in mono, because if all goes well, i can save a lot of money on windows 2008 licenses.
We're running C# code, and increasingly some F#, but not at all interested in taking desktop or web applications from Windows and dropping them onto Macs or Linux.
We're historically a microsoft shop but recently (in the last 18 months or so) have started running linux backend servers for many of our services running on EC2. If I wanted to be buzzword compliant I'm sure I could come up with some string of cloud nonsense to describe it.
We have something that looks kinda like Hadoop crossed with an app server that we can deploy components in.
I'd be happier with a solid final version of Mono.Simd rather than slavishly filling in any missing parts of older .net.
Sounds like we're doing similar stuff. The code I'd like to run under Mono is neither ASP.NET nor WinForms. It's plain vanilla string processing and HttpRequesting with some minor crypto and SSL thrown in to use AWS.
That's the stuff I'd expect to be there and it's not.
That's the fun part. The tool says everything is good to go. That's partially why I felt so burned by it, having assurances that everything I was doing was implemented. Running the code, it doesn't even thow. It just quietly exits.
After a few weeks running into issues like that, I just quietly exited myself. Windows EC2 boxes are only 25% more expensive than Linux ones, and they run .NET natively and correctly, so my particular problem is solved.
I am quite sure that complete compatibility with any one release of .NET would silence a lot of FUD by Microsoft and make pointy-haired bosses less reluctant to sign checks for deploying .NET/Mono applications on non-Microsoft platforms.
If it's you who are developing, it's easy to code around the holes, but if you need a closed-source application designed to run on .NET (and I don't know why people want these things, but they do) you have little to no choice but going Microsoft.
And that's a dealbreaker for Mono more often than you imagine.
I have plenty of interactions with some of the best in my field; I work as an engineer with some guys who have done groundbreaking work. However, I have personal reasons why I wish to complete my education with a doctorate. Advancement at work is definitely not one of them as I'm doing quite fine without.
Since I'm doing the work myself in the evenings, it would be nice to get some paperwork along the way.
As a first approximation, that's a good metric :-) And yes, it does make the valley an epic fail in general. You can caltrain/vta both ways to a certain extent. Or else its cabs. But really, there's not a decent downtown all the way from morgan hill until you hit san francisco.
I find San Jose downtown to just be a bit depressing.
Marriage isn't an option really as I'm already married. Even as a thought experiment, it'd mean my family having to leave the country while I remarry and so forth.
If it comes to that I'd prefer to just leave with them and start elsewhere (english speaking and decent weather).
As you say though, the system really is unfriendly to immigrants. Even those with a US graduate education and cash to demonstrate they would not be a drain. And don't even get me started on the taxes I've paid.
My laptop is the IT standard bastardized version of XP so I can run outlook. Though perhaps it'd be easier to crack it open, up the RAM, and run ubuntu in a VM on it..