kallasoft

With Mono 2.0 being released yesterday I bet you are wondering “What is this new and great wonder that keeps popping up in the news every now and again?”

Well, Mono is an Open Source, ECMA compliant answer to Microsoft’s .NET set of tools.  Mono has been famed for it’s C# compiler and Common Language Runtime and has .NET compatible toolset that runs on a wide variety of *nix platforms including Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD, and yes, of course, Windows.

The Mono project was started by Miguel De Icaza of Ximian fame back in 2001. It made great progress on a seemingly impossible task with only a handful developers.  It was also well received in the OSS community and received corporate backing when the founding company, Ximian, was purchased by Novell in 2003.

With this release, Mono brings a whole slew of new features (straight from the website) including Compatibility with Microsoft’s:

• ADO.NET 2.0 API
• ASP.NET 2.0 API
• Windows.Forms 2.0 API
• System.XML 2.0
• System.Core
• System.Xml.Linq
• System.Drawing 2.0 API

Along with Microsoft API compatibility, the Mono project has also managed to expand its own APIs to include (again straight from the site):

• Gtk# 2.12 support
• Mono.Cecil
• Mono.Cairo
• Mono SQLite support
• Mono.Posix

The new release also features a Visual Basic 8 compiler and C# 3.0 compiler implementation fully supporting LINQ (A project started by Microsoft to create a set of extensions for the .NET framework which help simplify querying, selecting, and filtering all kinds of data sources ranging from arrays to XML files).

This release should be great news for those either needing to port .NET applications to other platforms or with projects requiring platform independence. Just in case you didn’t know how big this project has become you can check out the huge list of applications already using the Mono runtime here.

If you are a Windows developer that has an existing .NET 2.0 application in the field or are a *nix developer looking for cross platform tools consider using Mono.  After all, using Mono to develop your applications can only help increase your existing user base.   For more information check out the release notes here.