Xbox 360 CLR Possibility
It looks like there’s a possibility of the .NET CLR being available for XBox 360 development. Check out these Microsoft blogger posts from Mike Zintel and David Weller. This is good news for me, as I am one of those weirdos that like a cross platform story. The ideal is to be able to develop managed code and be able to run it on many platforms. Sure Write once, run anywhere (WORA) has become a bit of a joke but its more a case of excessive expectations rather than impracticality.
Supporting an application on another hardware/operating system platform is a non-trivial decision as it does require additional development, testing and support resources. A platform that has some aspect of WORA functionality just eases a lot of the burden on the development side. A design that separates out the GUI portion from the Domain Model allows platform specific GUI code to be minimized, if a platform specific approach is needed. A good automated test suite helps on the test side of the equation. So though the idealized WORA world may not exist, cross platform managed code development has a heap of application reach advantages.
Being involved in the development and maintenance of a cross platform SCADA product called MacroView since the late eighties has skewed my thinking towards a cross platform approach. A lot of code can work well with little modification across a number of platforms – especially in the purely managed code worlds of Java and CLR implementations. It’s just a shame when vested interests of extremes of the WORA debate spoil the party.