Novell launches Mono 1.0 open source .Net suite

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 1 Jul 2004 at 12:53

Novell's long-awaited open source version of Microsoft's .Net framework has finally made it out of beta.

Mono 1.0 is a development platform for open source coders that allows programmers to quickly build applications that run on a variety of platforms from Windows and MacOS to Linux.

Linux on the desktop is beginning to be taken that much more seriously, with Red Hat announcing its desktop strategy and Sun busy firing off customer wins for its JDS system. If they are to make progress in what is still a Windows world, tools to develop cross platform desktop applications will be in demand.

The goal with Mono is to make creating such applications, along with the production of APIs and SDKs, faster and easier.

'Even as Linux grows on enterprise desktops, developing applications for the Linux desktop has been challenging because existing tools were extremely technical and complex,' said Miguel de Icaza, Novell vice president of development and founder of the Mono project. 'Mono is an extremely usable, commercial-grade development platform for Linux desktops and servers with a complete set of tools and APIs. It's based on published standards and proven programming languages and libraries, and Mono's cross-platform capabilities also extend to applications for Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS X and other flavors of UNIX.'

As Linux continues to make inroads onto the desktop, software able to manage networks made up of heterogenous operating systems will increasingly be in demand.

Matthias Bauer, head of development for Voelcker Informatik AG, a Berlin-based consulting company working with the City of Munich, said, 'With Mono we can integrate Linux systems into our IT service management solution. Mono is a very important step that allows us to easily create cross-platform management solutions and integrate Linux as a manageable server system into standard Microsoft networks.'

Mono includes a C# compiler, a .NET-compatible runtime environment and two stacks of APIs: one for Linux and another for the Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 with support for ASP.NET, ADO.NET and several other components.

It boasts a cross-platform Gtk# GUI programming library that allows programmers to develop for Linux, Windows and MacOS X from a single code base, with support for a range of languages, including VisualBasic, Python, JScript and Java.

Mono is a community project, initially under Ximian, which was bought by Novell last year. Novell syas it is using the suite internaly to speed the development of its own future products such as iFolder and ZENworks.

Version 1.0 is available from /www.mono-project.com.