Big events from the world of Mono / .NET - in detail about everything

Over the past days, there have been a number of major announcements and releases from the world of Mono - open source implementation of the .NET platform for a variety of operating systems (Unix, FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS X).

Firstly, on December 10, the MonoTouch framework was released, you can read more about this event here . This framework allows .NET developers to write programs in the familiar and powerful C # language and use familiar and favorite tricks, libraries, and proven code. For example, MonoTouch fully supports technology such as LINQ. For developers under MonoTouch, printed literature is already available, a book has been published .


The new MonoTouch release is a pleasant event, but the framework is young and is updated quite often. And here is the release of the final version of the Mono platform- This is a more significant event. On December 15, Miguel de Icaza, the Novell executive responsible for development, wrote on the blog about the release of new versions of Mono 2.6 and the MonoDevelop 2.2 development environment. The work on the new version took 9 months from the team and during this work a lot of work was done to implement the new functionality. Miguel’s blog describes the following highlights:

• support for WCF services on both the client and server side;
• LLVM support for improved performance;
• new Mono.Tasklets framework for implementing multithreading scripts and some others;
• full support for Linq To Sql through the DbLinq project ;
• new debugger integrated into MonoDevelop with support for MacOS and Unix;
• this Mono release includes Microsoft open source projects: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, Microsoft DLR.

On the other hand, the MonoDevelop development tool in the new version also received a lot of innovations :

• MonoDevelop code has been translated under LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licenses, all GPL code has been removed from the project so that add-ons for the environment under Apache, MS-PL and other licenses can be used;
• significantly improved user interface, the implementation of which was inspired by ideas from Chrome, Firefox, Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Xcode;
• full support for ASP.NET MVC, including debugging of such applications;
• The T4 macro processor previously available in Visual Studio is now implemented in MonoDevelop;
• added the ability to create Moonlight projects;
• the new debugger can work with code written for the console, Gtk #, ASP.NET, iPhone and Moonlight;
• a bunch of improvements for working with code and refactoring;
• Python plugin
• plugin for MonoTouch.

Miguel reports that when working on the new version of Mono, 2 million lines of code were updated: 7208 source code files were changed, 1392400 lines of code were changed, 440016 were deleted. About a million lines of code were added. Probably, the Mono project is one of the largest open source projects of the current time. The MonoDevelop project also received significant code filling: 2427 files were changed, 464,284 updated lines, 120,124 deleted, about 300,000 lines of code added.



Next major releasebecame the release of Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology for quickly efficiently building feature-rich RIA applications. Moonlight 2.0 is available - the final version of the second version of the framework. The new version has a lot of innovations, improvements and bug fixes. Moonlight 2.0 fully implements the functionality of Silverlight 2.0 and a significant part of Silverlight 3.0:

• Silverlight 3 Pluggable Pipeline;
• Easing animation functions;
• partial support for non-browser mode;
• Writable bitmaps;
• Some data binding features introduced in Silverlight 3.0
• Smooth Streaming .

The progress is impressive when you consider that the project is completely open source and implemented by the moonlight community and Novell. According to Miguel, the Moonlight project contains 142,000 lines of C ++ code and 320,000 lines of C # code, a significant part of which is the contribution of open source code from Microsoft Silverlight Controls. Miguel also announced that the Moonlight team is working on official Chrome support for Linux. Another good news was the updated project site , which now looks just fine.

Together with the announcement of the new final version of Moonlight 2.0, the developers' plans for the release of the following versions of the project became known :

• the first versions of Moonlight 3 will be released in early 2010, beta is expected in the second quarter, and a release is scheduled for the third quarter of 2010;
• Moonlight 3 will contain the following new features: 3D graphics, pixel shaders, assembly caching, full support for off-browser mode, support for custom codecs, native support for MPEG-4 H.264 / AAC Audio;
• the first versions of Moonlight 4 are scheduled for the third quarter of 2010;
• Moonlight 4 will focus on supporting the following functions: support for webcams and microphones, enhanced privileges of applications with access to local data, notifications, support for Arabic and Hebrew, rendering HTML within the application, implementation of WCF RIA Services.

Thus, in a few days, the Mono technology line was completely updated. Congratulations to all the .NET / Mono developers and all the others who are following the project. By studying and investing time in .NET, today you can use the full power of the platform on both Windows and Linux using Mono. In addition, .NET developers have a unique opportunity to write iPhone applications using their favorite tools and technologies.

Stay tuned, .NET technologies are evolving daily, and Mono's progress is a clear indication.