A new version of Mono is available, the new features include: Cairo support, Remoting.Corba support, as well as a managed XSLT implementation. Existing features have been improved vastly: better Windows.Forms, runtime, faster compiler, web services, better compliance to the spec and more. On other C# news, the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP1 Redistributable is available.
Mono 0.26 released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I still like Python though, and having found the joys of PyObjC ( http://pyobjc.sf.net ) I must say, making large GUI programs has never been easier.
nice
an unpleasant question? Is Mono ready? By which I mean: is Mono a iable alernative to .NET NOW?
I don’t have an opinion about the question, I am asking. As many, when Mono was launched I was afraid it would have to play catch up forever with MS, and I’d lke to know whether that proved to be true or not …
Mono is an alternative to .NET. Well in fact, how can one speak of .NET (running only Windows only) as an alternative to Mono (running on Windows and _Linux_). Anyway, today Mono can run most non-GUI (System.Windows.Forms) applications. Work on SWF is proceeding.
I think the DotGNU Portable Framework (or whatever the heck they’ve called it) is further along and more “ready” than Mono, but I have to admit, I haven’t been paying much attention (since I develop on Windows now).
I’m glad to see Windows.Forms support in Mono though; with Mono and DotGNU, and the C# language being an ISO standard, the .NET stuff is truly portable… and it’s more “open” than Java.
Despite coming from Microsoft, I like C# and the .NET Framework a lot. C# has become my favourite compiled language (and Python is my favourite interpreted language).
– chrish
Hi Chris,
actually, Mono is more ready than dotGNU. There was a nice post from a reader about it on a previous mono story. Mono is scheduled to be called 1.0 before the end of the year.
I’m not sure I’d call anything that requires Wine for its widget toolkit “portable”.
Frankly, the widget toolkit is only a small part of Mono. The reason the chose WineLib was that they wanted 100% compatibility with the Windows.Forms-namespace (using Windows-like semantics and so on). Of course, Gtk# still exists (and is 100% portable and almost complete) for non-Windows GUI apps.
– Simon
I’m not sure I’d call anything that requires Swing for its widget toolkit “portable”. The word “portable” doesn’t mean very much, code written in java is not magically able to run on any OS/CPU-combination. If Wine would work as well as Java then you could say that code written for x86(instead of Java bytecode) and the Win32 API (instead of the Java API) would be portable. Someone still has to write an interpreter for the code and implement the libraries on other platforms.
I wouldn’t compare dotgnu and mono, I’d compare portable.net and mono though. Mono’s SWF is a bit interesting as it takes the route of using a dependency on wine requiring certain libaries from microsoft to run the software. Pnet does the handling of ICalls from SWF to x11, thus providing ease to the developer. Personally, wine is a big headache to me and I wouldn’t want a linux thinclient using wine for its gui applications when it can run natively.