[DotGNU]A note on using Portable.NET

[Rhys Weatherley]

Hi all,

I'm getting an increasingly number of messages from people
who are trying to get Portable.NET to work and find that
some parts of it don't appear to do anything.

Many parts of Portable.NET are still a work in progress.
Just because a program exists and builds doesn't mean
that it fully works yet.  The documentation may even
refer to functionality that doesn't exist in some cases.

A case in point is the number of people trying to run "Hello
World" with "ilrun" and finding that nothing happens, or they
get obscure error messages pertaining to "mscorlib".  Right
now, "ilrun" will attempt to load the program and then fail
because the C# library is not present.

The C# library, pnetlib, is not complete and must be compiled
with the C# compiler, which is also not complete.  So "ilrun"
bombs out.  Even if the C# library is fixed, "ilrun" still won't
work because the interpreter isn't finished.

As you can see, there are a lot of pieces that still need to be
done before "ilrun" can do something minimally useful.  Even
when we get "Hello World" to go, there are lots of other bits
and pieces that are required to run other applications.

Since version 0.1.6, I have put a list of programs on my
Web site listing what is done and what isn't.  I will keep
this list up to date:

http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html

Please be patient.  This is a big project, and it will take
some time to get something that actually works.  And if
you can help out, it will decrease the amount of time that
it takes to get there.

Cheers,

Rhys.