Paint.net is a free, open source, graphic editing program which I've started to love. If anyone could convert this into a Portable Application that would be great :).
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Unfortunately, paint.net, while it is an excellent and open source application, requires .NET to be installed in order to run. Since this is still not the case with a significant majority of PCs, especially when you realise how many of the different versions of .NET are not inter-compatible with each other, then this site considers .NET applications to be inherently un-portable, and so does not attempt to deal with them.
If you use the search feature, you will find quite a number of other threads where people have asked for paint.net in the past, and it is possible that one of them may have links to a launcher, or an unofficial portable version that you could use (where you were lucky enough to find .NET installed).
Welcome to PortableApps.com, though
I've seen that there are efforts to port it to the .NET replacement MONO (seen that Paint.NET doesn't work "out of the box" with MONO)... Could that be the way to go?
I think I've read somewhere that MONO could be made portable. As Paint.MONO is released under Open Source (MIT/X11 License) and source code is avaliable, there should be a way to some portable port?
But: I am not a programmer, I've just tried to collect some informations as I am very annoyed by GIMPs user interface (even if I like its features).
Question to one of the coding gurus outthere: Am I right? Could that be done?
Link:
http://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/
In principle, your idea works. It would technically be possible to create a portable version of Mono and run some .NET applications portably against it.
However, there are a couple of little things stopping it from happening, just yet....
Firstly, Mono isn't finished - not even close to, not by a huge distance. There is a vast amount of it that is there and works, and it is already possible to write complete apps against it that are fully functional. BUT.... you cannot just take any .NET app and run it with Mono instead (yet). The PortableApps site, at the moment, doesn't generally work on anything other than stable releases of software. It doesn't do alpha, beta, or development versions (with a VERY small number of exceptions such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org).
Secondly, even if there was a stable version of Mono available to portablise, paint.net doesn't work with it. Some (most) functionality from it works with the Mono Paint version that you link to, but it is not finished itself, and only works against the current SVN Mono tree.
In a few months time, the answer might be different, but, from personal experience, the Wine project was mostly complete (as Mono is now) over five years ago, so, unless you can convince the paint.net team that they should be using Mono as a target instead of .NET, then you will always be lagging significantly behind the product, and constantly having to put in more developer time to get the basic product to work, and that is even before the extra effort of making a portable version, of both Mono and paint.net.
So, in theory, yes, it could be done.
In practice, it is many hundreds or thousands of programmer-hours away from happening, which makes it highly improbable in the forseeable future.