Re: [Visionaries] library question

[Chris Smith]

On Sunday 14 September 2003 05:16, Kamen Yotov wrote:

> can i use (some) of the microsoft standard .NET dlls with the pnet
> execution environment? using System.* with pnet should be able to give me a
> fairly complete class library with a portable execution environment...
> because all these are IL binaries i should be able to just drop them and
> use them?

Okay from a _technical_ point of view:
Not quite.  You'll find that a lot of the lower level operations (like reading 
and writing files etc) actually call out to the operating system via a system 
called PInvoke.  class libraries that do this cannot be used directly on 
another OS.  However pure C# class libs will work as long as their 
dependencies are satisfied.  It's a rocky road though, the classes themselves 
may comply with the ecma spec on the interface side, but behind the scenes 
all sorts of things may be going on, including pinvoke.
Nothing's ever as straightforward as it seems.

The question is, has anyone tried this (on a non windows platform of course)?

my 2c.
Chris