Mono update promises to pull in .NET 2.0
Version 2 of Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, has been released.
The purpose of the Novell-sponsored Mono project is to help developers write applications that can run across a variety of desktop and server operating systems, including Linux or Unix-like platforms, Windows, Mac OS and Solaris.With the new version, released on Monday, the community behind the project is promising improved performance and reliability over earlier versions of Mono.
Mono is the toolset that was used to create Moonlight, a subset of the project and an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich media browser plug-in.
"Mono 2.0 gives .NET developers the freedom to run their applications on a wide variety of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS and Unix," said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of development platforms at Novell and the originator of the Mono project, in a Monday statement.
De Icaza added that the new release "benefits a wider range of developers, [independent software vendors] and end-users by allowing them to write their applications once and run them on any [operating system] platform, dramatically increasing portability and expanding their market reach".
The second full version of Mono provides the core application programmer interface for .NET 2.0. Mono 2.0 contains what are claimed to be "complete implementations" of .NET 2.0 controls, such as ToolStrip, MenuStrip, StatusStrip and ContextMenuStrip. It also includes the Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA), described by Novell in a Monday statement as "an analytical tool for .NET-to-Linux migrations".
The project now supports C# 2.0 and C# 3.0, Language Integrated Query (Linq) and Linq to XML. In addition, according to the release notes, "support for expression trees is now available as well as the backend to support expression tree compilation", and a working debugger is included for the first time.
Other features of Mono 2.0 include an implementation WebBrowser, based on Mozilla's Gecko HTML rendering engine, a better (but still partial) implementation of DataGridView and a complete implementation of FlowLayoutPanel.
Support for the following Microsoft APIs is included in Mono 2.0:
- ADO.NET 2.0
- ASP.NET 2.0
- Windows Forms 2.0
- System XML 2.0
- System.Core
- System Drawing 2.0
- System.Xml.Linq
Under a 2006 partnership deal announced between Microsoft and Novell, the Mono project is deemed to not infringe on Microsoft patents for .NET.