Linux Has Mono

[Ken Hess]

Today the Mono Project released the much-anticipated Mono 2.0 for Linux. After two-and-a-half years in development, Mono 2.0 is finally here and ready to run your .NET 2.0 applications, Windows Forms, ASP.NET content on Mac OS X, BSD and Linux. Mono is multi-language capable--choose your own path from C#, VB, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Eiffel, F#, Oxygene and more.

Mono is a cross-platform, open source .NET development framework.

Now the question is, why? Why would anyone want to use .NET for anything if you're still using PHP, Python, Java, etc. for development?

Mostly it's because Miguel de Icaza, the Mono Project's founder and leader, liked .NET after checking it out in December 2000. From his interest, the Mono Project was born in 2001. Three years later Mono 1.0 became available.

Another reason for .NET development on Linux is that developers are able to create .NET applications without having to spend money on Microsoft licensing for workstations or servers. Linux is also very stable and runs .NET applications with fewer problems than its Windows counterparts.

Mono isn't perfect, though, for example, if you port from Windows to Linux, you can only expect about 60% of your code to work as is. It certainly isn't drag-n-drop like true cross-platform languages like Python or PHP but it gets you a true .NET platform at no cost.

Novell owns the Mono project which may assist in its further development since Novell and Microsoft have become technology partners.

Mono developers are currently working on Mono 3.0 to support the .NET 3.0 environment and code.

[peter_budo]

I'm sorry you did not bring anything new beside that there is mono 2.0. You just merged publicly available facts to tell us mono 2.0 is here. There is nothing specific about it, no new features mentioned or explained, or no personal experience or opinion in first use

PS: Nice to have it Mono 2.0 available, but they have serious work ahead to catch up with current .NET technologies available to Win based developers

[khess]

All I could get on short notice to post timeline was what is on their site plus talking with an Open SuSE person. There wasn't much else to tell. I have no personal experience with Mono because I don't/won't use .NET technology--I find no reason to do it. I spent 2 years as a .NET developer and hated every minute of it. Part of the time I spent as a .NET developer, I converted some of what had been done to PHP and just added .aspx as an extension in Apache and named my files .aspx so that they would look like .NET but only I knew better.

As I said in the post, Mono 3.0 is forthcoming. I hope it doesn't take them another two years. My hope for them is that they can knock it out in 6 months.

What more would you want to know about Mono? Maybe I can get some answers but realize that, even with Press credentials, I can only get what's publicly available--no one can really get more. If I do get unreleased news, I'm under embargo to hold on it until it is released by the company.

[scru]

Welcome to the yesterday, Mono.