I recently read a post by a Jeff Dillon (a Sun employee) entitled .NET and Mono: The libraries were he criticizes the fact that the .NET Framework has Windows specific APIs. Specifically he writes
Where this starts to fall apart is with the .NET and Mono libraries. The Java API writers have always been very careful not to introduce an API which does not make sense on all platforms. This makes Java extremely portable at the cost of not being able to do native system programming in pure Java. With .NET, Microsoft went ahead and wrote all kinds of APIs for accessing the registry, accessing COM objects, changing NTFS file permissions, and other very windows specific tasks. In my mind, this immediately eliminates .NET or Mono from ever being a purely system independent platform.
While I was still digesting his comments and considering a response I read an excellent followup by Miguel De Icaza in his post On .NET and portability where he writes
First lets state the obvious: you can write portable code with C# and .NET (duh). Our C# compiler uses plenty of .NET APIs and works just fine across Linux, Solaris, MacOS and Windows. Scott also pointed to nGallery 1.6.1 Mono-compliance post which has some nice portability rules. ... It is also a matter of how much your application needs to integrate with the OS. Some applications needs this functionality, and some others do not. If my choice is between a system that does not let me integrate with the OS easily or a system that does, I personally rather use the later and be responsible for any portability issues myself. That being said, I personally love to write software that takes advantage of the native platform am on, specially on the desktop.
First lets state the obvious: you can write portable code with C# and .NET (duh). Our C# compiler uses plenty of .NET APIs and works just fine across Linux, Solaris, MacOS and Windows. Scott also pointed to nGallery 1.6.1 Mono-compliance post which has some nice portability rules. ... It is also a matter of how much your application needs to integrate with the OS. Some applications needs this functionality, and some others do not.
If my choice is between a system that does not let me integrate with the OS easily or a system that does, I personally rather use the later and be responsible for any portability issues myself. That being said, I personally love to write software that takes advantage of the native platform am on, specially on the desktop.
At first I was confused by Jeff's post given that it assumes that the primary goal of the .NET Framework is to create a Write Once Run Anywhere platform. It's been fairly obvious from all the noise coming out of Redmond about WinFX that the primarily goal of the .NET Framework is to be the next generation Windows programming API which replaces Win32. By the way check out the WinFX overview API as JPG or WinFX API Overview as PDF. Of course, this isn't to say that Microsoft isn't interested in creating an interoperable managed platform which is why there has been ECMA standardization of C#, the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and the Base Class Library (BCL). The parts of the .NET Framework that are explicitly intended to be interoperable across platforms are all parts of the ECMA standardization process. That way developers can have their cake and eat it too. A managed API that takes full advantage of their target platform and a subset of this API which is intended to be interoperable and is standardized through the ECMA process.
Now that I think about it I realize that folks like Jeff probably have no idea what is going on in .NET developer circles and assume that the goals of Microsoft with the .NET Framework are the same as that of Sun with Java. That explains why he positions what many see as a flaw of the Java platform as a benefit that Microsoft has erred in not repeating. I guess one man's meat is another man's poison.