The Mono project is an open source effort sponsored by Ximian (now owned by Novell) to create a free implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Development Framework from the open specification released through ECMA …

Anyway, they have finally released Beta 1 of the Mono project for download on their site … including some very interesting extras such as:

• Support for Linux and Windows, as well as Unixes like Solaris and HP-UX, and even PowerPC, SPARC and S390 based architectures!
• A C# compiler (for C# 1.0) and a preview compiler for C# 2.0 (which includes generics)
• An embeddable runtime for hosting the CLI to provide scripting functionality
• GTK# for GUI development
• Database providers for Postgress, MySQL, DB2, Sybase, Sqlite, and Oracle and of course, an implementation of ADO.NET
• A cryptography stack!
• an Apache module (note that Mono also includes ASP.NET and ADO.NET, so come to your own conclusions on that front).

• a Java VM which allows Java code to run side-by-side with .NET code

Of course, what’s still missing is a useable implementation of WinForms (System.Windows.Forms) which is only available in an early alpha form. This is what I can’t wait for! The possibility of writing cross-platform applications in C# has me so excited I keep checking the Mono pages just to see if there’s news about it.

Yadda, Yadda … oh, what are you still doing here? Go read the release notes or download the beta or something!

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