Over the past few months, I have been tempted to convert the current version of dasBlog to run under Mono (Note, there is a much older version that runs on Linux/Mono http://www.go-mono.com/ports/).
So far it has proven to be quite impossible. Unlike most of the open source projects, dasBlog heavily relies on some third party .Net libraries where source is generally not available.
For the most of the part, the windows specific source code (e.g. source code that accesses Windows registry) can be modified to do without relying on Windows API. And most of the third party libraries dasBlog relies on have no compatibility issues.
However, there are a few show stoppers. The following is a Mono Migration Analyzer report generated against the latest dasBlog (1.9.6264.0). As you can see, the two worst offenders are FreeTextBox.dll and DPAPI.dll. Frankly, I am quite disappointed that such a wonderful blogging tool cannot be easily ported to Linux and UNIX variants and there seems to be very little interests in the open source community to make dasBlog a true cross-platform blogging tool. Well, I guess for now I will keep running it under Windows…
