Current estimate on running Pract-Eze Dental on Linux or Mac is December 2006.
Pract-Eze Dental is written in C#, Microsoft's newest language. C# requires the .NET framework, which does not currently ship with any Windows systems. The .NET framework will be replacing Win32 and will be the foundation of the next version of Windows. The .NET framework is included on the Pract-Eze Dental distribution.
Mono is a project that is working to make .NET programs run on Linux and Mac among others. Version 1.0 of Mono was released in June of 2004, but it was not complete enough to run Pract-Eze Dental because it does not have support for Windows forms. Version 1.2 of Mono should be released around April of 2005. Although it will be a big step forward and will be capable of running many windows programs, it will be missing the datagrid control which we need.
Here is the list of their progress: http://svn.myrealbox.com/mwf/owners.html
You can track their daily progress at http://svn.myrealbox.com/blog/
A news article about Mono is available at http://tools.devchannel.org/devtoolschannel/04/04/21/169234.shtml?tid=46
Since we are planning for the freedom to move to Linux, Pract-Eze Dental does not store preferences in the Windows registry for which there is no counterpart in Linux. Instead, both local preferences and those which apply to every computer in the office are stored in the mySQL database. This also greatly simplifies working with preferences and settings, and adding new workstations without having to spend all day setting them up.
Windows Vista
Looking ahead to the next version of Windows, the first thing we are going to do is to change the look and feel of the program to match. Of course, we are already years ahead of the competition because we have written everything in C#. So we will be able to very quickly take advantage of many of the new features of Windows Vista such as easier deployment, management, and security. We may also take advantage of a few of the communications features and the 3D drawing features. We are also going to pick and choose only those features that we will be able to duplicate in Linux.