Download Mono 2.0

The developers behind Mono reached the important milestone of version 2.0 on Monday. Mono is an open source implementation of the .Net Framework. By using Mono, developers can write cross-platform applications that will not only work under Windows, but also on Mac OS X and Linux, for example. The software includes a c# compiler, a .Net compatible runtime and two different 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), and the other provides a variety of Linux and Unix-specific features. The key changes from the 2.0 release can be found below:

Microsoft Compatible APIs

• ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.
• ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.
• Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
• System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.
• System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
• System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.
• System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.

Mono APIs

• Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
• Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
• Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
• Mono’s SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
• Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces.

Third Party APIs bundled with Mono

• Extensive support for databases: PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
• C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono.

Compilers

• C# 3.0 compiler implementation, with full support for LINQ.
• Visual Basic 8 Compiler.
• IL assembler and disassembler and the development toolchain required to create libraries and applications.

Tools

• Debugger: this is the first release when we support a debugger for managed code.
• Gendarme: is an extensible rule-based tool to find problems in .NET applications and libraries. Gendarme inspects programs and libraries that contain code in ECMA CIL format (Mono and .NET) and looks for common problems with the code, problems that compiler do not typically check or have not historically checked.
• Mono Linker: a linker that allows developers to reduce the size of their executables and libraries by removing features from libraries using an XML definition of the desired public API.
• Mono Tuner: a tool to apply arbitrary user-defined transformations to assemblies. Mono uses this library to produce the Silverlight core libraries from the main system libraries.
• Mono Documentation Tools: the Mono Documentation framework has been upgraded to support documenting generics and extension methods. The tools can be used to produce online and offline documentation for any any APIs, and are used by the project to document our own APIs.

[break]