Wow.. how did I miss THIS thread?
I've pushed for this type of thing for a long time. I believe the Unity engine uses .Net assemblies under Mono to get compilation on the Mac, so it wouldn't be far removed at all for Max to retain cross platform capability even in the .Net world.
Things that have proven challenging to the native code generating Max are already part of the .Net framework (garbage collection, OO concepts, etc)
In theory, it wouldn't be too difficult to use CodeDOM to write a BMax.Net compiler against .Max files. The syntax is similar to most of the .Net languages.
I imagine the tricky part would be the pre-compiled framework files (provided all of those were going to be translated into .Net assemblies rather than linking native code libraries. And really, what's the point of doing a .Net version unless you go to pure or close to pure assemblies.)
Microsoft has already provided a bit of a mapping from Win32 to .Net.
(for those interested...)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/win32map.asp
There might even be an application out there that takes Win32 code and translates it to IL.
From my perspective dot net seems to have taken the backseat at M$ in that it hasn't-
been utilised in vista core in any meaningful way
offered in IE to provide some sort of applet / sandbox technology
huge chunks of directshow and dxutil not available without wrapping
j# support for migrating java apps was added, then removed, then added...
I'm not sure that indicates it's taking a back seat.
XNA was a rushed product. From my understanding, you can't even develop a game with it unless you use their free version of C# (why on earth should I need to install that if I have VS Pro?) This is the direction they are going though. They want to leverage PC and XBox. And since PS3 runs (or was it, is capable of) a Linux OS, it's not unreasonable that Mono could possibly run XNA assemblies if open GL is used instead of DirectX.
But you are correct about the Vista thing. After touting for months that Vista was going to be .Net in it's core, there are actually a minority of libraries that are managed code (well, according to things I've read anyway)
Then again, if you think about the hassle Microsoft got with marrying IE too close to Windows, it might be a legal decision to keep .Net deliberately separate from the OS and just make it a provided service.
That certainly seems to be how they've organized their development efforts lately. You KNOW Sun is just looking for an excuse to call their lawyers again ("Microsoft is shipping .Net, but not Java with their OS...")
I've pushed for this type of thing for a long time. I believe the Unity engine uses .Net assemblies under Mono to get compilation on the Mac, so it wouldn't be far removed at all for Max to retain cross platform capability even in the .Net world.
Things that have proven challenging to the native code generating Max are already part of the .Net framework (garbage collection, OO concepts, etc)
In theory, it wouldn't be too difficult to use CodeDOM to write a BMax.Net compiler against .Max files. The syntax is similar to most of the .Net languages.
I imagine the tricky part would be the pre-compiled framework files (provided all of those were going to be translated into .Net assemblies rather than linking native code libraries. And really, what's the point of doing a .Net version unless you go to pure or close to pure assemblies.)
Microsoft has already provided a bit of a mapping from Win32 to .Net.
(for those interested...)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/win32map.asp
There might even be an application out there that takes Win32 code and translates it to IL.
From my perspective dot net seems to have taken the backseat at M$ in that it hasn't-
been utilised in vista core in any meaningful way
offered in IE to provide some sort of applet / sandbox technology
huge chunks of directshow and dxutil not available without wrapping
j# support for migrating java apps was added, then removed, then added...
I'm not sure that indicates it's taking a back seat.
XNA was a rushed product. From my understanding, you can't even develop a game with it unless you use their free version of C# (why on earth should I need to install that if I have VS Pro?) This is the direction they are going though. They want to leverage PC and XBox. And since PS3 runs (or was it, is capable of) a Linux OS, it's not unreasonable that Mono could possibly run XNA assemblies if open GL is used instead of DirectX.
But you are correct about the Vista thing. After touting for months that Vista was going to be .Net in it's core, there are actually a minority of libraries that are managed code (well, according to things I've read anyway)
Then again, if you think about the hassle Microsoft got with marrying IE too close to Windows, it might be a legal decision to keep .Net deliberately separate from the OS and just make it a provided service.
That certainly seems to be how they've organized their development efforts lately. You KNOW Sun is just looking for an excuse to call their lawyers again ("Microsoft is shipping .Net, but not Java with their OS...")