Mono Project Roadmap

Last update: June, 2010

Per-component Plans are available, you can also check our Compatibility page that gives an overview of what is supported as of the latest public release of Mono.

Versioning

Mono releases are versioned like this: 

MAJOR.MINOR.SUBRELEASE
  • Even-numbered MINOR releases are stable releases.
  • Odd-numbered MINOR releases are unstable releases (development/daily builds).
  • SUBRELEASE indicates a minor update to a specific release.

Current Releases

 Mono 2.6 Released: December 14th, 2009
  • Support for Silverlight 2.0 subset of WCF
  • LLVM support
  • Co-routine framework Mono.Tasklets
  • Preview of LINQ to SQL using DbLinq
  • New Soft Debugger, integrated with MonoDevelop
  • Joint release with MonoDevelop 2.2
  • System.IO.Packaging
  • csharp shell now supports auto-completion
  • xbuild can now build most msbuild projects
  • Support for CoreCLR security:
    • Mono debuts a full metadata and IL verifier
  • Moonlight 2.0 released
  • Core WCF support.

The 2.6 series will replace 2.4 as our Long Term Supported version in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension (http://www.novell.com/products/mono/) product.

Mono 2.6 Release Notes

Mono 2.6-2.6.7 release notes

  • Dec 14th, 2009: First 2.6 release
  • Jul 20th, 2010: 2.6.7 released.


 Mono 2.4.3 (LTS) Released: Dec 8th, 2009
  • Bug Fixes
  • Upgraded xbuild, our msbuild implementation
  • Fine tuned memory usage

Mono 2.4.3 Release Notes

  • Nov 17th: Branched from the 2.4.x branch.
  • Dec 8th: Final release

This release is part of our long-term maintenance release for SUSE Linux Enterprise's Mono Extension (http://www.novell.com/products/mono/).

Upcoming Releases

These are some of the the major themes planned for upcoming Mono releases. It indicates our current goals, which may be adjusted as needed.

Most of the features for Mono 2.8 have been completed. Most of our efforts are in completing the work and polishing the rough edges.

 Mono 2.8 Planned Release: TBD
  • Remove support for .NET 1.1 Framework (done)
  • Remove deprecated libraries from previous iterations (done)
  • Default to 4.0 Profile (done)
  • Moonlight 3 Preview (done)
  • MonoDevelop 2.4: (Done) released on June 16th, 2010 (http://monodevelop.com/Download/MonoDevelop_2.4_Released)
  • Generation Garbage Collector goes into Beta.
  • C# Compiler
    • Full C# 4.0 support (done)
    • Refactored to run on Microsoft's System.Reflection.Emit
      • Allows the compiler to be embedded in Silverlight
      • Enables the use of Mono.CSharp.dll to be used on Windows
      • Run our CSharpRepl on .NET's runtime.
  • LINQ to SQL Beta (done)
  • Mono Embedding API (done)
    • Mono public ABI no longer depends on GLIB.
    • Various API entry point cleaned up.
  • Internals:
    • Mono drops eglib dependency, but it is still optional
  • Extended LLVM support (mostly done)
    • LLVM backend to the JIT is now able to compile 99% of our code.
  • WCF Upgrade
    • More WCF components supported
  • Microsoft Open Source Libraries integrated into Mono (done):
  • Parallel Frameworks:
    • New runtime ThreadPool implementation, increases scalability and performance of Mono on multi-core systems (done)
    • Preview of new managed implementation of Parallel FX (done)
  • ASP.NET 4.0 API supported


 Mono 3.0 Planned Release: TBD
  • New Generational GC becomes the default
  • IKVM-powered C# compiler.
  • Windows Workflow 4
  • Complete Parallel Frameworks
  • Complete .NET 4.0 Core Support
  • Complete WCF 4.0 API support

Subprojects projects

Other projects like the debugger, the documentation browser, Java integration through IKVM, Olive and Gtk# will remain on their own schedules. This page will be updated to contain that information when it becomes available.

Mono and Silverlight

See our page on Moonlight for details on the work underway to support Silverlight with Mono.

Partial Implementations

The following APIs and technologies have partial implementations and are under development.

  • Cardspace/Infocard.

Unsupported technologies

Some of the .NET technologies have been either deprecated, are too Windows-specific or are very large efforts and our community is unable to produce viable implementations for them.

If someone cares deeply about these APIs and implements them, we would likely bundle them with Mono, but they are not actively being worked on. There might be some code for these on our SVN repository, but the code is not suitable for production use nor do we recommend that developers building cross platform applications depend on it.

Too large stacks:

  • Windows Presentation Foundation

We are not working on any of the following deprecated APIs:

  • System.EnterpriseServices
  • WSE - Extensions to System.Web.Services.
  • Workflow Foundation 3 (WF3)
  • Code Access Security (.NET 1.0).

The following do not map to operating systems other than Windows, and we are unlike going to spend time to support them even on Windows:

  • System.Management

Nobody has shown enough interest in the following:

  • PowerShell

Comments

Feel free to send us your comments or questions about the roadmap.

Roadmap History

For our previous roadmap information, please see Roadmap History.