Hi all,

<rambling post>
I was just wondering if anyone has any experience of Mono, the open source .net implementation?

My new job (the reason I'm not on Hexus so often) is a very Micro$ofty house (gold partners) and everything they do is in .net, mostly asp and C#. I come from a C++ background with pretty good html, don't like vbscript and find javascript frustrating.

So what I want to do is develop a few interactive webpages, and then online applications (a simple dice game) as a practice in ASP.net and C#. A good geek project for me and good learning exercise for my job to get me able to do more interesting work.

Would mono enable me to host this kind of thing on my Apache-on-Linux based Internet account? Or would it most likely require my ISP to have installed and set it up?

If I tried to host a page at home over my ADSL, how successful would this be? Is Mono available as a Debian package (I've got a 900mhz box waiting for an install, and between Hexus and a friend there seems to be plenty of Debian Know how to tap into).

If it came to that would it be easier to use my XP-Pro box and run the M$ .net runtime on IIS? (Which I'm not keen to do, as I'd rather my main box wasn't plumbed into the net all the time

Final question, as a vague roadmap for my learning I was planning on going from a very interactive webpage with server side scripting (for my online cardgame) to some kind of downloadable client/server solution. Would Mono and .net be an interesting way of aiming for cross platform compatablitiy? And would it make the net code easy (I was vaguely thinking of trying in some way to pass bits of xml between the clients and server).

</rambling post>

Ummm, if you fancy commenting on any of that, positive or negative, advice, opinions or rants, please do. All contribustions gratefully accepted.

Thanks guys, Andrew.

PS The dice game is called "Dudo" or Peruvian Liar Dice, and if you get hold of about 30+ D6 dice, and about 6+ friends, it's REALLY good fun in a pub. Please don't tell me there are allready online versions out there