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

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

First, on December 10, the MonoTouch framework came out, 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 beloved tricks, libraries, and accumulated code. For example, MonoTouch fully supports such technology as LINQ. Printed literature are already available for developers under MonoTouch, a book has been published .


The new release of MonoTouch is a pleasant event, but the framework is young and updated quite often. But the release of the final version of the Mono platform is a more significant event. December 15 Miguel de Icaza - head of Novell responsible for the direction of development, wrote in a blog about the release of new versions of Mono 2.6 and the development environment MonoDevelop 2.2. The work on the new version took the team 9 months and in the course of this work a lot of work was done on the implementation of the new functionality. The following highlights are described in Miguel’s blog:

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

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

• the MonoDevelop code was transferred under the LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licenses, the entire GPL code was removed from the project so that you can use add-ons for the environment under the Apache, MS-PL licenses and other licenses;
• 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 available earlier in Visual Studio is now implemented in MonoDevelop;
• added the ability to create projects Moonlight;
• A new debugger can work with code written for the console, Gtk #, ASP.NET, iPhone and Moonlight;
• a bunch of improvements to work with code and refactoring;
• plugin for Python;
• plugin for MonoTouch.

Miguel reports that 2 million lines of code were updated when working on the new version of Mono: 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, 464284 updated lines, 120124 deleted lines, about 300 000 lines of code were added.
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The next major release was the release of Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology for quickly and efficiently building RIA applications full of functionality. Moonlight 2.0 is available - the final version of the second version of the framework. In the new version the mass 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 of the operation mode outside the browser;
• Writable bitmaps;
• some data binding features introduced in Silverlight 3.0;
• Smooth streaming .

Progress is impressive when you consider that the project is fully open source and is being implemented by the moonlight community and Novell. As Miguel writes, the Moonlight project contains 142,000 lines of C ++ code and 320,000 lines of C # code, much of which is contributed by Microsoft's Silverlight Controls open source code. Miguel also reported that the Moonlight team is working on official support for Chrome under 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, 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 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 support for the following functions: support for webcams and microphones, increased application privileges with access to local data, notification, support for Arabic and Hebrew, HTML rendering within the application, implementation of WCF RIA Services.

Thus, for several days there was a complete update of the Mono technology line. Congratulations to all .NET / Mono developers and all others who follow the project. By studying and investing time in .NET, you can already use the full power of the platform both on Windows and Linux using Mono. In addition, .NET-developers have a unique opportunity to write applications for the iPhone using their favorite tools and technologies.

Follow the news, .NET-technologies are developing daily, and Mono progress is a bright indicator.