Can we run DOT.NET in UNIX platform?
One of the drawbacks of using Visual Studio.NET and the .NET framework to develop applications has been the lack of cross-platform support. As the introduction of the .NET framework and common language run time a few years ago, there have been a few projects designed to bring the .NET framework to other platforms, including Linux and UNIX. The DotGNU project is touted as the "Free software alternative to .NET" and encompasses a number of projects, including DotGNU Portable .NET, which is designed to be used to compile and run C# and C applications on a multitude of platforms, containing GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. One of the main features of the product is it's compatibility with EMCA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), as well as Microsoft's own CLI execution in the .NET framework. The project chose to go with a "Virtual Machine" execution, where bytecode is transformed into a simple instruction set which is then passed to a "Converted Virtual Machine", which then are implemented through an interpreter. This approach is dissimilar to other open source .NET implementations, but gives more flexibility when porting the project to other platforms.