Mono Beta 2 Released

A little birdy writes "Less than a month after Beta 1 was released, Mono Beta 2 has been released. See the Release Notes, or go directly to the download page. It includes a C# compiler, an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure and two stacks of APIs: a Unix, Linux, GNOME, Mono stack for APIs that takes the most advantage of your Unix server and desktop and a set of APIs compatible with the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 that provides support for ASP.NET (web services and web forms), ADO.NET and many other components." And in a related story: darthcamaro writes "The drive to develop a FOSS implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework by DotGNU and Novell's Mono project is being painted as a contest between the Free and Open Source communities in an article on internetnews.com. The article details the running argument between DotGNU's Norbert Bollow and Mono's Miguel de Icaza on the issues of commercial involvement, software patents and all the 'religious' stuff that the Free software community holds against the open source community."

Comments

Re:What applications are there

[Tobias Luetke]

Well there is a compelete java vm which can run exclipse for mono. ( i know thats pretty hard to get the head around )

ikvm

also all major asp.net applications run

Re:Real-world examples of tangible benefits

[miguel]

We do support two stacks of APIs today in Mono: the Microsoft compatible stack (ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms) but we have been investing heavily in taking advantage of our own set of libraries that Linux, Unix, Gnome, X, Mozilla, CORBA specific.

For instance, Microsoft uses XmlSchema, Mono supports it, but distributed RelaxNG support as well.

We are working on Windows.Forms, but we also have strong bindings for Gtk# to build native applications. In fact MonoDevelop (www.monodevelop.org) is fully written using this stack.

We support the Microsoft database APIs, but we ship providers for all the open source (Postgress, MySQL, Sqlite) providers and other third party databases (DB2, Sybase, Oracle).

Tao is a backend agnostic set of 3D graphic APIs (OpenGL, Cg, SDL) while we still plan on supporting the Direct3D managed APIs.

Our set of APIs is what has allowed us to build things like MonoDevelop: a fairly complete IDE for Mono for developing Linux-based applications.

Re:What applications are there

[Trigun]

will the applications I write with this stack work on Windows?

If you write a pure C# program that does not use the GTK-Sharp , QT-sharp, or any other neat bindings, it should run. The very simple Hello World apps work.

I still think that the mono developers are straying a bit from what they should be doing. For the windows forms, they are relying on certain wine-libs. This works, but is not as elegant as it can be. Miguel was talking about the next incarnation of gnome being written in C#, essentially using the Gnome bindings for it. My opinion is that they should build gnome to natively handle the windows.forms portion. I am not so tied to the look of the applications as I am functionality. I could care less if Microsoft.office.NET looks like gnome when run on gnome.

Re:Does mono do SSL?

[miguel]

Hello,

Yes, thanks to the work of Carlos Guzman and
Sebastien Pouliot we now have support for TLS and
SSL (it is a fully managed implementation ;-)

miguel.

Re:What applications are there

[rootmon]

Yes, they already are ported. You can write GTK/GTK+/GTK# apps for Windows today.

See http://www.nullenvoid.com/gtksharp/wiki/index.php/ BuildingGuide?PHPSESSID=d0459fba82585e5219f9d4c95c 24721f
for an on-line guide.

I've been using GTK apps like GIMP and DIA at work where I'm stuck with Windows for a long time now.

GIMP Win32 installer: http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/

DIA Win32 installer:
http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/

BTW there are very few if any "linux only" libs. Most of those libs are part of the GNU System, they work with the Linux kernel, BSD variants, Solaris, and most UNIX Systems. Many have Win32 ports or ports to the Cygwin POSIX environment for Windows.

Re:No VB.NET support

[miguel]

A few updates on VB.NET:

We have a full time developer working on this
(Anirban) and you will see a lot of work on
compliance from him.

Mainsoft has donated a full VB.NET runtime that
we are now integrating.

Rafael and others have just obtained a grant
from the government of Brazil to complete the
VB.NET support in Mono.

And in addition to that, a few open source developers
work on it on their spare time.

You are right, the Open Source developers are not
particularly thrilled at doing VB.NET, but it is
important to bring developers from Windows, so
that is why the effort is being funded.

Miguel.