All you need to know about Mono

BANGALORE, INDIA: Ankit Jain of Novell laid the platform called Mono at dissection table while leading a session named ‘Mono – a platform for running and developing modern applications while promoting interoperability’ at Spark IT 2010 here today.

“Mono is a platform for running and developing modern applications while promoting interoperability. It is an open source platform very similar to Microsoft .NET but supports multiple languages and multiple platforms such as x86, Power PC, Spark and it is also binary and source compatible,” said Jain.

Mono is sponsored by Novell, which has 40 internal developers worldwide and 200 external contributors. It can work on vibrant ecosystem of open source projects such as Banshee, Monsoon. Mono is parallel to .NET and is completely open sourced.

Jain also spoke about ‘Mono develop’ which, according to him, is an open source IDE just like visual studio. It also features multi platform and multi language support and has version control system integration. It features complete support for visual studio project library.

Talking about Mono tools, he said that the tools have a plug-in for visual studio. One can write text and debug across platform applications from visual studio itself using the tool. It features Mono compatibility scan, testing on windows and Linux and facility for debugging remotely on Linux.

What if you want an application on iPhone and want to reuse your existing .NET or C# frame work? Mono touch enables .NET and C# on iPhone iPod. Lots of such applications are already on Appstore and validated by Apple. Mono platform is used by Unity, Second Life, Codice-Plastic SCM and Mind Touch, he added.