Mono (software)-Cedar Herald Index

Mono is a free and open-source .NET Framework-compatible software framework. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. Mono can be run on many software systems.

History

When Microsoft first announced their .NET Framework in June 2000 it was described as "a new platform based on Internet standards", and in December of that year the underlying Common Language Infrastructure was published as an open standard, "ECMA-335", opening up the potential for independent implementations. Miguel de Icaza of Ximian believed that .NET had the potential to increase programmer productivity and began investigating whether a Linux version was feasible. Recognizing that their small team could not expect to build and support a full product, they launched the Mono open-source project, on July 19, 2001, at the O'Reilly conference.

Mono (software)

After three years of development, Mono 1.0 was released on June 30, 2004. Mono evolved from its initial focus of a developer platform for Linux desktop applications to supporting a wide range of architectures and operating systems - including embedded systems.

Mono (software)

Novell acquired Ximian in 2003. After Novell was acquired by Attachmate in April 2011, Attachmate announced hundreds of layoffs for the Novell workforce, putting in question the future of Mono.

Mono (software)

On May 16, Miguel de Icaza announced in his blog that Mono would continue to be supported by Xamarin, a company he founded after being laid off from Novell. The original Mono team had also moved to the new company. Xamarin planned to keep working on Mono and had planned to rewrite the proprietary .NET stacks for iOS and Android from scratch, because Novell still owned MonoTouch and Mono for Android at the time. After this announcement, the future of the project was questioned, MonoTouch and Mono for Android being in direct competition with the existing commercial offerings now owned by Attachmate, and considering that the Xamarin team would have difficulties proving that they did not use technologies they formerly developed when they were employed by Novell for the same work. However, in July 2011, Novell, now a subsidiary of Attachmate, and Xamarin, announced that it granted a perpetual license to Xamarin for Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, which officially took stewardship of the project.

Current status and roadmap

Mono's current version is 6.0.0 (). This version provides the core API of the .NET Framework and support for Visual Basic.NET and C# 7.0. LINQ to Objects, XML, and SQL are part of the distribution. Windows Forms 2.0 is also supported, but not actively developed, and as such its support on Mono is incomplete. Version 4.0 was the first version that incorporates Microsoft original source code that was released by Microsoft as part of the .NET Core project.

As of January 14, 2021, Mono has full support for all the features in .NET 4.7 except Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (which the Mono team do not plan to support due to the amount of work it would need) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and with only limited support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the ASP.NET async stack. However, System.Web and WCF are candidates for 'almost immediate' porting from the .NET reference source back to Mono. Some missing parts of the .NET Framework are under development in an experimental Mono subproject called Olive.

The Mono project has also created a Visual Basic .NET compiler and a runtime designed for running VB.NET applications. It is currently being developed by Rolf Bjarne Kvinge.

Moonlight

An open-source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, called Moonlight, has been included since Mono 1.9. Moonlight 1.0, which supports the Silverlight 1.0 APIs, was released January 20, 2009. Moonlight 2.0 supports Silverlight 2.0 and some features of Silverlight 3.0. A preview release of Moonlight 3.0 was announced in February 2010 and contains updates to Silverlight 3 support.

The Moonlight project was abandoned on May 29, 2012. According to Miguel, two factors sealed the fate of the project: Microsoft added "artificial restrictions" that "made it useless for desktop programming", and the technology had not gained enough traction on the Web. In addition, Silverlight itself was deprecated by Microsoft by 2012.