On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Roderick Colenbrander thunderbird2k@gmx.net wrote:
For a part the issue is that lots of programs are hybrid ones. Some of them behave 'nicely' in the way they just call a few functions from a native win32 dll. I think apps that embed COM objects (like a Word viewer, ..) are worse as mono doesn't offer this at all. The most problematic thing is that mono's windows.forms is fully managed while microsoft just layered it on top of gdi32/gdiplus/user32. This allows you to use standard win32 apis on most windows.forms controls to override behavior. A lot of apps do this, so even if you could access native win32 dlls, magic like this won't work at all. Second COM objects might also rely on evil win32 magic.
Rather than ignoring mono these issues make it sound like Wine and mono should try to work together again. The EULA for the .NET runtime prohibits distributing it and using it on non-windows licensed systems so we are in much the same legal situation with IE where we have to have a replacement.