Mono Project News

Mono 1.9.1 has been released

We have done a minor release of Mono 1.9, Mono 1.9.1 that contains various bug fixes. Please see the release notes for details.

Mono 1.9.1 is available from our downloads page.

Packaged .NET Software for Linux

As part of the QA process for Mono, our fabulous QA team has been packaging various popular open source .NET applications, Gnome, Gtk#, ASP.NET, libraries and Windows.Forms in an easy-to-install fashion for various Linux distributions.

We are using the OpenSUSE Build Service to make the software available for various Linux distributions.

Our repository is available here, for instructions on how to add the repository see the user manual.

Mono C# Compiler Under MIT X11 License

Starting with version 2.0 of Mono, the Mono C# compiler source code will also be available under the MIT X11 license.

We are changing the license to allow parts of the compiler to be reused as part of MonoDevelop, our LINQ class libraries and to embed it in ASP.NET.

In MonoDevelop: This will allow the compiler to be used to improve code-completion to support C# 3.0 as well as improving the heuristics when offering completions. This will reuse the front end and parts of the backend.

Compiler hosting inside ASP.NET: This will embed the whole compiler into the ASP.NET process, eliminating about one second for each compilation of a piece of code. In the past, for each request for an uncompiled resource, we would have to call the compiler, wait for its output and then load the output. This typically shaves between 0.7 to 1 second on those scenarios, ideal to improve the developer experience.

LINQ Class Libraries: This will allow us to reuse parts of the compiler in our System.Core implementation for LINQ for the current 3.5 generation and upcoming generations. Many corner cases are handled by the compiler, and we will now be able to lift those pieces. This will mostly use the backend of the compiler.

Mono 1.9 Released

Slightly delayed news, a few weeks ago we released our best Mono release so far: Mono 1.9, the last release before Mono reaches its 2.0 level.

Mono 1.9 is considered a stable release and should be considered the new stable version to be shipped. It should replace older versions of Mono 1.2

You can obtain this from the downloads page.

Porting Tutorials: ASP.NET and Windows.Forms

These tutorials are quite popular to help developers that have a Windows.Forms or ASP.NET application port it to Unix. They walk you through the process of bringing your software to Linux, MacOS X or Solaris:

• Porting ASP.NET Applications
• Porting Windows.Forms Applications

It is also useful to look at the general porting guidelines.

MonoDevelop 1.0 has been Released

After a few years in the oven, we are ready to announce the first release of MonoDevelop. Lluis has put together a set of in-depth release notes that covers the major features available in MonoDevelop and links to various tutorials and screencasts as well as extensive screenshots of what is available in MonoDevelop 1.0.

MonoDevelop 1.0 is designed mostly for Linux developers creating Gnome and ASP.NET applications but MonoDevelop is also available for MacOS users that download our Mono installer and will still be useful if they are building Mono-based applications on OSX.

The IDE has many of the features that you would expect from a modern IDE for Mono: support for programming in multiple languages, an extensible design, editors and designers for ASP.NET and Gnome applications, integration with Unix toolchains and Visual Studio Solutions, support for source code control and following standard Unix development practices, integrated NUnit testing, Unix Packaging and Deployment (following the GNU conventions, and Mono conventions) for libraries and packages), internationalization and localization, tools to maintain your project documentation and command line tools to access this functionality.

We have some pretty good language support in this release: C#, VisualBasic.NET, Java, C and C++. Check the previous link for the details as to how extensive the support is for each feature.

Some screencasts:

• Creating a Simple User Interface with MonoDevelop.
• Creating Custom Widgets with MonoDevelop.
• You wrote it, now you want to ship it, see how MonoDevelop can help you: Buildig Packages with MonoDevelop.
• Using Subversion to host your source code, see Using Version Control with MonoDevelop.

There is more documentation on MonoDevelop available as well.