Mono development platform

Mono is an based computers.

While Microsoft made a version of .NET available for FreeBSD called the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure, Microsoft s shared source license is not Free_Software and may be insufficient for the needs of the community (it explicitly forbids commercial use).

Version 1.1.9.1 was released on September 22, 2005. Mono 1.0.6 was the last of the maintenance releases in the 1.0.x-series. Focusing on the new functions is the 1.1.x-series that eventually will lead into the new 1.2 major release.

The Mono VM contains (in 32 bit mode) and AMD64 and SPARC for 64 bit modes. The VM can just-in-time compilation or it can pre-compile the code to native code. For other systems not listed, an interpreter is used.

A similar project, called Portable.NET, is part of the DotGNU project.

=History=

Miguel de Icaza became interested in the .NET technology as soon as the .NET documents came out in December 2000. At GUADEC 2001 Miguel de Icaza showed a demo for a few folks of their C# compiler and how it was able to parse itself.

Internally at Ximian there was much discussion about building tools to increase productivity: making it possible to create more applications in less time and therefore reduce time and cost of development. After a feasibility study Ximian finally decided to move staff from other projects and create the Mono team. The Mono team didn t have the strength to build a full .NET replacement on their own and on July 19 2001 the Mono open source project was announced at the O Reilly conference.

Almost three years later, on June 30 2004 Mono 1.0 was released.

=Mono and Microsoft s patents=

A lot of discussion has taken place about whether Microsoft could destroy the Mono project with patents. The Mono team has acknowledged this problem in their FAQ: : The .NET Framework is divided in two parts: the ECMA/International_Organization_for_Standardization covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms. Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms.

: The controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets. Those are convenient for people who need full compatibility with the Windows platform, but are not required for the open source Mono platform, nor integration with today s Mono s rich support of Linux. The Mono strategy for dealing with these technologies is as follows: (1) work around the patent by using a different implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless.

=Related projects=

Numerous projects have been created to allow developers to use Mono in their development environment: *[http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/ gtk#] are bindings which tie the Mono framework into the GIMP Toolkit libraries. *gecko# are bindings for embedding the layout engine used in Mozilla (Gecko (layout engine)).

Tao (software), a collection of graphics and gaming bindings

=Software developed with Mono=

The following are programs that use the Mono API and C#. *[http://banshee-project.org/index.php/Main_Page Banshee] is a music management and playback software for GNOME *Beagle search tool is a desktop search tool. *[http://home.gna.org/bless/ Bless] is a hex editor. *[http://cdcollect.sourceforge.net/index.php CDCollect] is a CD catalog application. *F-Spot is a convenient photo management program developed by Novell. *[http://galaxium.sourceforge.net/index.html Galaxium] is a MSN instant messenger (IM) client. *[http://zapdos.codemonkey.cl/glyrics/ GLyrics] is a lyrics finder. *iFolder (by Novell) lets you share files across multiple computers and with other users through peer-to-peer or Novell s groupware server products. *[http://www.imendio.com/projects/blam/ Imendio Blam!] is a RSS (protocol)-news aggregator especialy good for reading [http://planetplanet.org/ planet]-feeds like [http://planet.gnome.org/ Planet Gnome]. *MonoDevelop is an Integrated development environment for creating Mono applications. It was originally a port of SharpDevelop to gtk#, but is today developed on its own. *Muine is a music player with a user interface designed to be intuitive, developed by Jorn Baayen who also worked on Rhythmbox. *Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Lab, is rumored to switch from their own Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to Mono sometime in the near future. *[http://sky-net.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php SkyNET] is a sky chart application. *[http://smuxi.meebey.net smuxi] is an IRC client for advanced users written with Gtk#/Gnome#, [http://smartirc4net.meebey.net SmartIrc4net] and [http://nini.sourceforge.net Nini]. *Tomboy (software) is a desktop note-taking application which uses a wiki-like linking system. *[http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/ Virtuoso Universal Server], from [http://www.openlinksw.com/ OpenLink Software], is a cross-platform hosting environment for Mono/.NET/C#, JSP, Perl, Python programming language, PHP, and other runtime environments.

=See also=

*IKVM *IronPython *managed code *Monoppix

=Notes=

*[http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing#Patents FAQ http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing#Patents FAQ].

=External links=

*[http://www.mono-project.com/ Mono] homepage *[http://www.gotmono.com Mono Community] *[http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/mono-list/2003-October/016345.html Mono early history] *[http://www.mono-project.com Mono Wiki] *[http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/ Monologue] *[http://www.monohispano.org MonoHispano, A Spanish Mono community] *[http://monobrasil.softwarelivre.org MonoBrasil, A Brazilian Mono WebSite] *[http://pascalfresnay.free.fr/monoweb/wiki/ Mono France, A French Mono WebSite] *[http://www.monocolombia.com/wiki/doku.php MonoColombia, A Colombian Mono WebSite] *[http://mono-project.de MonoGermany, A German Mono WebSite] *[http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,32056,00.html Running .NET on Linux or Windows] *[http://www.nabble.com/Mono-f1367.html Mono Forum] *[http://www.nabble.com/Ximian-f1406.html Ximian Forum]