Download Mono 2.8

Tuesday version 2.8 of Mono became available. Mono is an open source implementation of the .Net Framework. By using Mono, developers can write cross-platform applications that, in addition to Windows, also work on Mac OS X and Linux, for example. The software includes a C# compiler, a .Net-compatible runtime and two sets of APIs. The former provides compatibility with Microsoft’s .Net Framework, including support for asp.net, ado.net, and a number of other components; the other offers all sorts of Linux and Unix-specific features. The main improvements in this release are listed below.

The highlights of this release include:

• C# 4.0
• Defaults to the 4.0 profile
• New Generational Garbage Collector
  • Use mono –gc=sgen or mono-sgen to use Mono with the new GC
• New Frameworks from Mono MIT X11 and Microsoft MS-PL/Apache2:
  • ASP.NET 4.0
  • Parallel Framework: including PLINQ.
  • System.XAML
  • System.Dynamic
  • Managed Extensibility Framework
  • ASP.NET MVC 2
  • System.Data.Services.Client (OData client framework)
  • WCF Routing
  • .NET 4.0’s CodeContracts
• Performance:
  • Large performance improvements
  • LLVM support has graduated to stable
    • Use mono-llvm command to run your server loads with the LLVM backend
• Version 2.0 of the embedding API
• Removed the 1.1 profile and various deprecated libraries.
• OpenBSD support integrated
• Mono no longer depends on GLIB
• Threadpool exception behavior .NET 2.0

For the full details, check our detailed Mono 2.8 Release Notes