Jim Purbrick (Babbage) from Linden Labs has announced on the SecondLife Blog that they have started the rollout of their Mono-enabled servers.

They are using Mono as an engine that accelerates the execution of user provided scripts by translating LSL scripts into ECMA CIL bytecodes and in turn letting Mono turn that into x86 machine code.

[Read More...].

Marc Christiensen has announced the release of our first preview for Mono 2.0. You can read our preliminary release notes for this release.

The preview release is available from our preview download directory. The source code for this release is available here.

Please report any bugs that you may find using our Bugs page, AND reply to this thread with the bug numbers so we can track them! http://www.mono-project.com/Bugs

You can see the bugs we're tracking for Mono 2.0 here: https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.go-mono.com%2Farchive%2F2.0%2F&order=bugs.bug_status%20

The earlier you file the bugs and reply to this message, the more likely your bugs will get fixed.

Special attention is given to regressions, so if you can tell us a version of Mono where the bug worked and you tag the summary of the bug with [Regression], then it is much more likely your bug will get fixed.

Please help the Mono team to make 2.0 the best ever.

We have just released Moonlight 0.7 to the public.

Get your copy here.

This new version of Moonlight works on both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 and sports some significant changes from 0.6:

• Webkit loads the plugin (kangaroo, lewing)
• The stream/downloader/request/response logic (used for downloading media) has been been almost entirely moved from the browser bridges into libmoon, with the browsers providing subclasses. (kangaroo, sde)
• Finally add argument checking to all wrapped plugin objects (fejj).
• Windowless mode fixes (lewing, toshok)
• Plugin event handling fixes (lewing)

Web-based forums for Mono discussions have been added at http://www.go-mono.com/forums

Most active Mono community members participate in on-line discussions through our mailing lists; however, many Mono users have expressed a preference for web forums based discussions.

In order to address this demand for an official forums for Mono, while keeping the community engaged in our mailing lists, we have embedded nabble.com into our site to create a bridge between the two groups. So, you can now use whichever method you prefer participate in the community.

To encourage users to try out Moonlight, we are doing a source-code only release of Moonlight for developers to try out Moonlight.

To try out Moonlight, you have two options:

• Media codecs: you must do your own build from source code.
• No-media codecs: we provide one-click addins for Firefox that will install with no effort.

Firefox addins are available from http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight.

Source code for Moonlight is available from here. To compile Moonlight from source code follow these instructions.

We have done a minor release of Mono 1.9, Mono 1.9.1 that contains various bug fixes. Please see the release notes for details.

Mono 1.9.1 is available from our downloads page.

As part of the QA process for Mono, our fabulous QA team has been packaging various popular open source .NET applications, Gnome, Gtk#, ASP.NET, libraries and Windows.Forms in an easy-to-install fashion for various Linux distributions.

We are using the OpenSUSE Build Service to make the software available for various Linux distributions.

Our repository is available here, for instructions on how to add the repository see the user manual.

Starting with version 2.0 of Mono, the Mono C# compiler source code will also be available under the MIT X11 license.

We are changing the license to allow parts of the compiler to be reused as part of MonoDevelop, our LINQ class libraries and to embed it in ASP.NET.

In MonoDevelop: This will allow the compiler to be used to improve code-completion to support C# 3.0 as well as improving the heuristics when offering completions. This will reuse the front end and parts of the backend.

Compiler hosting inside ASP.NET: This will embed the whole compiler into the ASP.NET process, eliminating about one second for each compilation of a piece of code. In the past, for each request for an uncompiled resource, we would have to call the compiler, wait for its output and then load the output. This typically shaves between 0.7 to 1 second on those scenarios, ideal to improve the developer experience.

LINQ Class Libraries: This will allow us to reuse parts of the compiler in our System.Core implementation for LINQ for the current 3.5 generation and upcoming generations. Many corner cases are handled by the compiler, and we will now be able to lift those pieces. This will mostly use the backend of the compiler.

Slightly delayed news, a few weeks ago we released our best Mono release so far: Mono 1.9, the last release before Mono reaches its 2.0 level.

Mono 1.9 is considered a stable release and should be considered the new stable version to be shipped. It should replace older versions of Mono 1.2

You can obtain this from the downloads page.

These tutorials are quite popular to help developers that have a Windows.Forms or ASP.NET application port it to Unix. They walk you through the process of bringing your software to Linux, MacOS X or Solaris:

• Porting ASP.NET Applications
• Porting Windows.Forms Applications

It is also useful to look at the general porting guidelines.

After a few years in the oven, we are ready to announce the first release of MonoDevelop. Lluis has put together a set of in-depth release notes that covers the major features available in MonoDevelop and links to various tutorials and screencasts as well as extensive screenshots of what is available in MonoDevelop 1.0.

MonoDevelop 1.0 is designed mostly for Linux developers creating Gnome and ASP.NET applications but MonoDevelop is also available for MacOS users that download our Mono installer and will still be useful if they are building Mono-based applications on OSX.

The IDE has many of the features that you would expect from a modern IDE for Mono: support for programming in multiple languages, an extensible design, editors and designers for ASP.NET and Gnome applications, integration with Unix toolchains and Visual Studio Solutions, support for source code control and following standard Unix development practices, integrated NUnit testing, Unix Packaging and Deployment (following the GNU conventions, and Mono conventions) for libraries and packages), internationalization and localization, tools to maintain your project documentation and command line tools to access this functionality.

We have some pretty good language support in this release: C#, VisualBasic.NET, Java, C and C++. Check the previous link for the details as to how extensive the support is for each feature.

Some screencasts:

• Creating a Simple User Interface with MonoDevelop.
• Creating Custom Widgets with MonoDevelop.
• You wrote it, now you want to ship it, see how MonoDevelop can help you: Buildig Packages with MonoDevelop.
• Using Subversion to host your source code, see Using Version Control with MonoDevelop.

There is more documentation on MonoDevelop available as well.

Mono Snapshot builds for trunk are now available. They are synchronized about once every hour and they contain the source code for all modules that we typically package from trunk, as well as RPMs for a few systems every few hours.

EntitySpaces has announced a winner for their contest to write an application to run on Linux with Mono.

From their announcement:

If you are an EntitySpaces customer, you can now travel anywhere. From Windows, to Mono/Linux solutions, to the Compact Framework and all kinds of wireless devices, to Web Applications including "Medium Trust" support, or to high-end Enterprise Applications, EntitySpaces can take you there. EntitySpaces is truly a tiny, lightweight, powerful architecture for the Microsoft.NET Framework, and uses zero reflection. If you are a Mono developer, EntitySpaces is a terrific architecture for you. With it, you can work on both sides of the isle. Our database independence can free you from most of the complexities of supporting many types of databases, including those that run under Mono, such as MySQL and VistaDB. No longer will you have to invent new architectures with every new challenge that comes down the road.

Our contest winner goes by the title Pro.Coder, and is a independent contractor. We have received his entry to our Mono contest, and were quite pleased. Pro.Coder sent us a DVD with the EntitySpaces demo running under Mono. Thank you Pro.Coder, you did an excellent job. An image of it is shown below. Pro.Coder added the CRUD and DynamicQuery Join examples, to satisfy our contest requirements.

Read their announcement for details on how Pro.Coder got started with Mono. It details what they downloaded (EntitySpaces, Mono, MySQL connector, VMWare Player, Mono VMware image), which versions of the software they used, how they imported the database and how they were able to deliver the application.

Rob Howard today announced that their Graffiti product will run on top of Mono, and the platforms supported by Mono:

Early this week we announced that VistaDB will be the database that Graffiti uses by default. You will be able to use other databases (SQL Server and MySQL) too, but we liked VistaDB for a variety of reasons. One of which we're officially announcing today:

Graffiti is going to run on Mono.

There are a variety of reasons why adding Mono support makes sense. But the biggest reason is choice. It gives people more choices for how they want to use Graffiti.

By supporting Mono, in addition to Microsoft .NET, Graffiti will be available on the following platforms:

Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Unix

We're not there yet, but we've been working with some folks on the Mono team to make the necessary changes in Graffiti to run on Mono. Everyday we get a little closer, but we're far enough along now that we're ready to start talking about it.

Of course, having someone like Telligent making this announcement has made all of us very happy. We look forward to their product launch.

Here is an intro about what Graffiti is.

We have released the new version of MoMA which corresponds with the 1.2.6 release of Mono. There are two very important changes that are worth mentioning about this new version.

- Addition of .Net 3.0/3.5 Classes - Beginning with 1.2.6, we include the definitions needed to scan your .Net 3.0 and 3.5 apps. At this point, we report everything as missing. Even though we have implemented some of these classes in our Olive project, we do not currently ship this with the released Mono, and MoMA tracks the Mono releases.

So what good is adding the 3.0/3.5 stuffs if we are going to report it all as missing? We will soon be getting to the point where we need to figure out what new stuff to implement next. By scanning your app with MoMA and submitting the missing report, we can see which parts are the most important to our users so we can prioritize. (And yes, we _really_ use this data. MoMA reports have pretty much dictated our prioritization since it was released a year ago.)

- Removal of Design Namespaces - One of our awesome mono-vangelists pointed out that people scan their app (and third party controls) and see all kinds of warnings about things missing in the Design classes. However, these classes are not used to run apps, just for designers such as Visual Studio. So we are potentially scaring off users for no reason. Therefore, beginning with 1.2.6, we no longer include the Design namespaces in MoMA reports. (If you really want the Design stuffs, you can download the definition file that includes them on the MoMA home page.)

- How Do I Get These New Features? - The new class definitions could not be handled by existing version of MoMA, so you will need to download a new version of MoMA, which is available on the MoMA homepage: http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA.

We have just released Mono 1.2.6. Some of the highlights for this release include:

• Native Windows.Forms driver for MacOS X allows Winforms-based applications to run without an X server.
• Support for the ASP.NET AJAX APIs and controls.
• Support for FastCGI deployments: ASP.NET can now be deployed on a multitude of servers that implement the FastCGI protocol (lighttpd for example) in addition to Apache.
• Windows.Forms now supports the WebControl on Windows and Linux using Mozilla.
• Runtime will now consume much less memory for 2.0-based applications due to various optimizations in generics support as well as including many new performance improvements and an updated verifier and an implementation of CoreCLR security.
• C# compiler is quickly approaching full 3.0 support, most of the basics work right now (except support for System.Query.Expression AST generation).
• Mono 1.2.6 can now be used as an SDK for creating Silverlight 1.1 applications on all platforms. This allows developers to create applications that target Silverlight without requiring a Windows installation.

Full details are available on the release notes. To get a copy, visit the downloads section on the web site.

Gert Driesen has announced a major upgrade to NAnt. This release includes many new improvements and you can download source and binaries from here.

The Mono Project is participating in Google's Highly Open Participation (GHOP) Contest. If you're a pre-university student over the age of 13, check out our task list and claim a task. If you successfully complete it you'll win a t-shirt and a certificate, and for every three tasks you complete you'll win $100, up to a maximum of $500. The most successful students will win a trip to Google's Headquarters in Mountain View, CA!

This is a fantastic opportunity to join an open source community, help people, and get rewarded for it. It's not limited to coding; you can write documentation, translate an application, or even create icons. Applications built with Mono such as Banshee and F-Spot are taking part too.

If you have any questions, hop onto IRC or email our mailing lists and we'll do our best to help you. All community members are welcome to help out guiding students and suggesting new tasks.

We have published the current version of the Mono Summit Schedule here: Mono Summit Schedule.

As you can see, there are already a lot of interesting presentations and we will be adding a couple more this week!

More information on the summit can be found here: Mono Summit 2007.

If you plan on attending, you should register here.

The MonoDevelop team is proud to announce the release of MonoDevelop 1.0 beta 2 (0.17). This is the second in a series of beta releases that will lead to MonoDevelop 1.0, hopefully around the end of the year.

MonoDevelop is a GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. This release contains lots of improvements, new features and bug fixes.

The release highlights include:

• Basic support for ASP.NET web project deployment.
• Support for Visual Studio 2005 Web Application projects.
• Generation of Satellite Assemblies for localized resources.
• Plenty of bug fixes and other improvements.

Full Release Notes and Installable Packages and Source Code.

We are in the process of putting together an agenda for the 2007 Mono Summit in Madrid. If you are a contributor or user of Mono, and are interested in presenting, demoing or being involved in the summit in any way, please send Jackson an email with your proposal.

Please include in your proposal a topic, description, and your desired presentation format (ie a Talk, Birds of a Feather, Company Sponsored outing, or just a brief demo). We will also need to know the length of time you will need for your presentation.

The Mono Summit 2007 will be hosted by UNED at their Escuelas Pias location venue in Madrid, Spain.

The meeting will be split in two:

• Mono Contributors: 2-day meeting for contributors to the Mono project on November 26th and 27th.
• Mono Users and Developers: 3-day meeting for developers and users of the Mono platform.

For more details see our Mono Summit 2007 page.

Miguel de Icaza has written a statement on Mono's position to the opening of the .NET source code.

Since the source code release from Microsoft later this year will not be open source, this code will have no impact on Mono's schedule as it will not be able to use any of the information included in this code.

Mono's policy on contributions continues to be the same that we have had over the years: if you have seen Microsoft .NET source code in any shape or form (soure code, decompilers, through NDAs or research licenses), you will not be able to contribute patches to the Mono implementation.

For more details about Mono's policies, see our contributing page.

Alp Toker created DBus# an implementation of the client and server D-Bus protocols. The design utilizes generics extensively and it lead to a very clean design for mapping RPC messages to Mono.

The slides for this work are available here.

This Saturday morning (September 15th) at 8am MDT we will be doing our final migration to the Novell Bugzilla system. Although we expect this migration to take much less time, we have planned a http://bugzilla.ximian.com outage until Monday (September 17th) at 8am. During the outage, http://bugzilla.ximian.com will not be accessible.

Once the migration is complete, http://bugzilla.novell.com will be the official Mono Bugzilla. In preparation for the switch, please create a Novell.Com account by going to the following URL.

Novell Login Creation Page.

It is important that you use the same e-mail address for this account that you use on http://bugzilla.ximian.com.

GemBoxSoftware produces .NET components that allow developers to read, write and convert spreadsheet files (XLS, CSV and the new XLSX).

Their GemBox.Spreadsheet product recently was updated to support Mono out of the box. The code is 100% managed .NET and will run on all Mono supported platforms and works on all .NET supported languages.

We have just released Mono 1.2.5.

There are many improvements in this release. See our release notes here,

MonoDevelop 0.15 Released

MonoDevelop is a GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. For details and screenshots see the Release Notes.

Some highlights:

• Configurable keybindings (with Emacs keybindings support).
• Localization support: integrates support for creating international applications (using gettext) and translating existing applications.
• Makefile generation: it can now generate plain Makefiles or Autoconf/Automake makefiles for projects.
• Header manager: for adding templates to your source code.

Plus various usability improvements all around (IDE, GUI Designer) and many of the reported bugs have been fixed.

On their recent newsletter, GaiaWidgets announced 100% support for Mono's ASP.NET with their Ajax-based widget set.

MonoDevelop 0.14 has been released, see the release notes for details on it. Major new features:

• Subversion add-in.
• Refactoring operations.
• New smart indenting for C#
• Project exporting and conversion (includes Visual Studio 2005).
• New features in Gtk# designer.
• Desktop Integration Features (editor for launchers, .desktop files).