Agree with Bruce Eckel?

[kyrathaba]

Bruce Eckel, author of "Thinking In Java", has been quoted as saying:

Currently, the main vulnerability and important question concerning .NET is whether Microsoft
will allow it to be completely ported to other platforms. They claim there’s no problem doing this,
and the Mono project (www.go-mono.com) has a partial implementation of .NET working on
Linux, but until the implementation is complete and Microsoft has not decided to squash any
part of it, .NET as a cross-platform solution is still a risky bet.

Agree or disagree that .NET is a risky bet?  Is Java the better choice given Microsoft's penchants?

[mouser]

this is absolutely my #1 concern, and my reason for not embracing it yet.  i want to be comfortable that it will be a viable cross-platform solution before i spend too much time developing large projects in .NET.

It doesn't mean i would rule out .net development, but i would think long and hard before i embarked on a large .NET project that i had hopes of porting to other platforms.

[jgpaiva]

Given the fact that big companies usually aren't up to their word, i'd say that's just a marketing move by ms.
Not that i'm agains ms, but they wouldn't give away the only thing they still hold: the programmers. Would they do that, if everybody started coding in cross-platform, windows would surelly be the company that would lose the most.
Probably, something like wxwidgets would be a better option.

[kyrathaba]

Yeah, I have a very uneasy feeling about Microsoft programming products.  I give them Kudos for the Express IDEs they've made available for free, but I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't put all my eggs in one basket.  In college, I had one class in Pascal.  Then, in later years, messed around with QuickBasic.  Back in 2002 I puttered around with VB6 for a long while, before finally, more recently, taking up C#.  Now, however, I've been hearing some really great things about Java.  I understand that SE5 incorporated features from C# that might have made Java developers want to switch to C#.  I'm downloading wxWidgets and NetBeans. 

Question: can applets run on just any old website?  There's a game idea I'd like to eventually implement, where the game would just be textual.  I'm wondering if Java or wxWidgets would give me the capability of authoring such a game that would run on my website and allow users to connect to it.

[Eóin]

For you eventual goals I'd say Java or Flash would be the way to go. wxWidgets is more about standalone applications over those that run within a browser.

[edit]Alternativly if you thinking of a server-side game (like say Kingdom of Loathing) then you'll be wanting to look into something like PHP.[/edit]

[tinjaw]

I agree with Bruce. He's spot on.

As for your other questions, kyrathaba, repost them as a separate thread and I will answer. Several people would most likely benefit from your questions and the various replies you will get, and I don't want it to get lost in a thread on a different topic.

[f0dder]

MS actually has released part of the necessary source. Haven't looked into it myself, so I dunno how much code it is and what the license is, and of course they could change things around at some point in the future.

It would make sense for them not to do so, though. The more platforms supported, the bigger chance of income from people who want visual studio because the alternatives aren't as good...