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Release Digest: GNU, November 7, 2003

DotGNU 0.1

[ Thanks to Norbert
Bollow
for this link. ]

DotGNU, the GNU project’s Free Software alternative to .NET, has
come a long way in the last 2.5 years, and it is now possible to
use DotGNU to implement application programs and web services in
C#, running them in the DGEE webservice server, and integrating
them with the phpGroupWare web-based GroupWare suite.

DotGNU addresses the risk of monopolistic .NET platform vendor
lock-in, since now you can compile and run C# and C applications
that use the base class libraries, XML, and System.Windows.Forms
under multiple operating systems, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac
OS X, MS Windows, and more!

DotGNU currently consists of three main development projects
(further components will be added over time):

  • DotGNU Portable.NET, which contains an implementation of the
    Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) – more commonly referred to as
    “.NET”. This component contains a very portable runtime engine,
    compilers for C# and C, a C# class library, and related development
    tools. More languages (particularly Java and VB.NET) are in
    progress.
  • phpGroupWare, a multi-user web-based GroupWare suite, which
    also serves to provide a good collection of webservice components,
    all of which can be accessed through XML-RPC so that you can easily
    integrate them into webservice applications of your own.
  • The DGEE webservice server provides the functionality of
    accepting, validating and satisfying web service requests. It is
    implemented on top of a highly scalable distributed middleware
    called “Goldwater”.

The DotGNU 0.1 CD-ROM is available from commercial vendors such
as CheapBytes.com which sells it at

http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart/0070010950.html

or you can download it as a gzip’ed iso image (219 MB) via
BitTorrent from
http://download.freedom.biz/dotgnu/dotgnu-0.1-cdrom.iso.gz.torrent

(BitTorrent is a Free Software P2P system that allows many users
to download a file, even when the download link is being
slashdotted, without harm to the server which offers the file. You
can download a BitTorrent client here.)

Since DotGNU is Free Software, it can be freely shared. If you
don’t have a CD burner, ask a friend to burn a copy for you!

For more information about the DotGNU project and how you can
contribute, please refer to http://www.gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/ or
http://dotgnu.org

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