One of the downsides to .NET is that I can't install it at work. I've tried and it wants to update the Windows installer which fails for some reason. I don't know if it's because I don't have the proper administrative access or what. Anyway, I can't do any C# development at work.

I just installed Mono to circumvent this problem. It looks like it'll work as long as I don't need anything from the .NET framework. This means using mint to interpret the applications.

So, I'm playing around with Mono. The error handling of the C# Compiler absolutely sucks. It bombs out after the first error! This wasn't acceptable back in the days of Cobol compilers and certainly isn't acceptable in this century. The syntax error descriptions are not very helpful either. It just tells me it is expecting an open parenthesis. I suppose if I knew the C# syntax better I might be able to figure out the error message. I guess I'll just have to compile it at home and hope Microsoft's compiler gives better error messages. One of the reasons I use jikes over javac is that jikes gives more descriptive error messages. Back when I was doing C and then later C++, I always used gcc because of its most excellent error handling.