Does such a thing exist anywhere?

Have a look at DotGNU, which aims to replicate .NET. And there's also Ximian's Mono project.

Steve

I don't think Mono is going to be a success. IMHO anything that is copied from Microsoft is going to be a loser even before starting. But I've no idea what is going to happen to DotGNU...

DotGNU seems to address the concerns I have with Microsoft solutions. To highlight the important issues (to me anyway,) quoted from the danger page on above site:

"...the DotGNU approach to "web services" will make it possible for end users to run webservice software on their own PC, so that the users are not forced to migrate their data to the webservice servers. "

"DotGNU will use a decentralized paradigm for authentication and authorization: No single company, server or entity will control authentication."

"... data which should properly be under the control of the users of the server may be stored on the webservice server. This may... make it difficult to move to a different webservice vendor, or to move a service in-house which was previously outsourced as a webservice. The DotGNU webservices vision proposes a solution to this remote data problem."


I like what I'm hearing from these guys. Can't say the same for M$.

Mono 1.0 was just released recently and it's great. Windows.Forms don't work yet but they are supposed to be ready by the end of this year. For now you can build with wx or GTK#. Another nice thing about the mono release is that it comes with MonoDevelop which while limited is a pretty cool IDE for developing mono applications and is being rapidly improved according to the website. The new Mono site is here and it has a lot of helpful information.