Mono 2.0 Is Out; Brings .NET To Linux

The Mono project, an open source initiative sponsored by Novell, has announced the availability of Mono 2.0, an open source, cross-platform .NET development framework. Mono 2.0 provides all the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, as well as other operating systems. The new Mono 2.0 release is now compatible with the desktop and server components of version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET framework and features the Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA), an analytical tool for .NET-to-Linux migrations.
"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, development platforms, Novell and maintainer of the Mono project. "Mono 2.0 benefits a wider range of developers, ISVs and end-users by allowing them to write their applications once and run them on any OS platform, dramatically increasing portability and expanding their market reach."

More than 2,000 .NET applications are Mono 2.0 compatible with no code changes. Mono 2.0 now includes MoMA, the Mono Migration Analyzer. MoMA, which runs natively on .NET or on the Mono framework, helps developers quantify the number of changes required to run their .NET application in a Linux environment. In an analysis of 4,600 .NET applications using MoMA, 45 per cent of the applications required no code changes to work with Mono. An additional 24 per cent of the applications were shown to require fewer than six code changes to run on Mono.

Mono 2.0 offers easy installation and comprehensive platform, hardware and API support -– the Mono framework supports a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD and Windows; a variety of hardware options, such as x86, AMD 64, IA-64 (Itanium 2), EMT 64, PowerPC, ARM, S390 and S390x, SPARC and SPARC 9; all Microsoft .NET 2.0 APIs, including ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms; and C# 3.0 compiler with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) support.

Mono 2.0 also includes performance upgrades -– improves scaling and performance for ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Mono runtime; and useful downloads -– a virtual machine image that comes with a ready-to-use development environment, as well as many open source Web and desktop .NET applications, including the ASP.NET Starter Kits and other demos. An updated version of the MoMA tool, with improved reporting, is also available.

Mono 2.0 is available now and can be downloaded at www.mono-project.com/downloads.