Last week Mono hit its 1.2 release. Novell uses Mono in server form for both ZenWorks and iFolder in its Suse Linux Enterprise 10 platform. This release was primarily focused on performance and scalability improvements. Enhancements can be found across the board in support for Windows Forms and System.Drawing, .NET 2.0 parity in C#, and debugger support for both X86 and X64.
InfoQ spoke to Miguel to find out more about the release. On what's new in 1.2, Miguel explained:With this release, we've solved an important issue by making it easier to translate the Microsoft user interfaces to Linux, an important contribution in increasing the number of client-side Linux applications,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms at Novell and maintainer of the Mono project. “Now feature complete, Mono has matured to the point that we believe the migration from ASP.NET and Windows Forms to Linux is easier than ever before and gives developers access to all the added benefits of Linux.
Windows.Forms 1.2, complete System.Drawing, much higher performance, ports to many new architectures, generics, C# 2.0 and preview for a lot of the 2.0 APIs. Full details are here: http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.2/
On interesting uses of mono around the net:
Unity (www.unity3d.com), wiki.com (the engine behind the DekiWiki in Wiki.Com), http://www.govtrack.us/ (tracking the US congress) and of course our own applications Beagle (http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page), F-Spot (f-spot.org) and Banshee
(http://banshee-project.org/Discover/Home)
Asked about the impact of the Novell-MS announcement, Miguel answered that it's too soon to tell (it just happened last week), but "at least a big part of our agreement (Office XML support) is being done with Mono."
Development is now shifting towards Mono 2.0, code name “Sirloin”. The planned featureset inclues:Mono 2.0: Core
- .NET 2.0 API support
- Compact GC
- More performance and scalability improvements
- MonoDevelop including debugger support
- MacOS X and X-Code support improvements
- Support for WCF (codenamed Olive)
Gtk#
- Databinding support
- .NET binding for Gnome APIs
Languages:
- VB Compiler
- C# Generics support
- GCC-based Compilers
Thanks Miguel and congratulations to the entire Mono team on a succesful release!