Mono 2.0 brings .NET to Linux

BANGALORE, INDIA: Novell has announced the release of Mono 2.0 which, is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Linux, Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems. Mono 2.0 is a major milestone in the Mono project, and it supports features which include Microsoft Compatible APIs (Application Programming Interface), Mono APIs, Third Party APIs bundled with Mono and Compilers which are part of the Mono 2.0 release.

"The Mono project started in 2001 as an effort to implement the .NET Framework to Unix. To bring both the new programming model based on the Common Language Infrastructure and C# as well as helping people migrate their existing knowledge and applications to Unix. Mono today supports a wide variety of operating systems, CPUs and a large chunk of the functionality available in the .NET Framework," stated the Mono project group.

According to the Release Notes, Mono 2.0 contains an API complete implementation of .NET's System.Windows.Forms (winforms) namespace, allowing winforms applications to run on Linux, MacOX and other Unix systems. It has a WebBrowser feature that is based on Mozilla's Gecko HTML rendering engine. The TableLayoutPanel allows controls to be positioned using a simple column/row layout and the FlowLayoutPanel allows controls to be positioned by flowing to fill available space. Additionally, Mono 2.0 has a SplitContainer, which provides an easier way to make adjustable layouts than using Splitters.

Addiitionally, Mono includes profiling tools, the standard development kit tools that are part of the .NET framework such as a Debugger for managed code, an extensible rule-based tool called Gendarme to find problems in .NET applications and libraries. Gendarme inspects programs and libraries that contain code in ECMA CIL format (Mono and .NET) and looks for common problems with the code, problems that compiler do not typically check or have not historically checked. Developers are allowed to reduce the size of their executables and libraries by removing features from libraries using an XML definition of the desired public API through the monolinker. 

Other features include the Mono Tuner which is a tool to apply arbitrary user-defined transformations to assemblies. Mono uses this library to produce the Silverlight core libraries from the main system libraries and the Mono Documentation tools framework has been upgraded to support documenting generics and extension methods. The tools can be used to produce online and offline documentation for any any APIs, and are used by the project to document our own APIs.

The Mono 2.0 release notes also hightlighted some of the major changes of Mono 2.0 from Mono 1.9 which include:

• Improved runtime performance and features
• Release of a new wizard-based GUI runner
• The compiler now support expression trees
• LINQ and LINQ to XML are now complete
• LINQ to Dataset has also been implemented
• Mono now has a performance counters implementation that can be used to monitor various statistics of Mono processes
• ASP.NET now has support for browser files
• Support for Native Methods
• Mono now supports 64-bit indexed arrays on 64-bit systems
  
  On MacOS and Solaris Mono supports DTrace probes