MonoDevelop goes cross platform

Tags: Monodevelop,Windows,Mono,Beta

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to get a cross platform .NET IDE. Homer's Odyssey described one man's effort to achieve such a thing. And it was not until today, September 9th of 2009 that the world can test out such a tool.

With this release MonoDevelop leaves its cozy Linux nest and embarks on a wild adventure into the hearth of MacOS and Windows. The MonoDevelop team made this one of their major goals for this release: to turn our loved IDE into a cross platform IDE.

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Mono for Windows

Tags: Mono,C#,Linux,Windows

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell, the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.Mono is a software that can develop and run .NET client and server applications.
Mono can run binaries produced by Visual Studio, there is no need to recompile. Mono API coverage is limited to the .NET 1.1 API at this point, with spotty support for 2.0.

Here are some key features of "Mono for Windows":
· Multi-platform
· Based on the ECMA/ISO standards
· Can run .NET, Java, Python and more.
· Open Source, Free Software.
· Commercially supported.
· Comprehensive technology coverage.

· LINQ to SQL is now partially supported
· New debugger engine - Mono Soft Debugger
· Early partial support for C# 4.0
· Includes some components of the ParallelFx framework
· Dynamic language runtime (DLR) is now distributed as part .NET 4 profile
· The WindowsBase assembly is now part of the standard Mono distribution
· A lot of WinForms fixes
· The csharp command now supports auto-completion using the tab key
· xbuild, the Mono implementation of the msbuild build tool has advanced significantly
· Mono now includes a sandbox and its verifier
· As part of the gsoc 2009, Jerry Maine ported Mono.Simd to AMD64
· It is now possible to compile Mono to use the LLVM code generation engine as an optimizing compiler for Mono
· Support for generics is greatly improved compared to 2.4
· Signal Chaining
· Debugging support for GDB

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Novell Moonlight 2.0 previews Silverlight on Linux

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From the 'Linux has it all' files:
It wasn't all that long ago that Moonlight 1.0 was released providing Linux users with a way to run Microsoft Silverlight media on their screens. Now Novell is out with the Moonlight 2.0 preview, including expanded functionality and compatibility with Microsoft's media framework.
While Moonlight 1.0 includes some Silverlight 2.0 functionality, Moonlight 2.0 is even more closely aligned with what Microsoft is currently providing and has a few new items too.

"The biggest single point I think is this - we're finally comfortable releasing a browser plugin containing the Mono VM," Chris Toshok's Moonlight team lead blogged. "This is pretty huge, and the runtime guys deserve a lot of credit for making it possible. This means we've invested enough time and effort into fleshing out the infrastructure (CoreCLR, as well as our metadata and IL verifier), and getting it to a point where we're not totally embarrassed to share our work."

Having the VM inside of the browser plugin is a key step, but at this point it's also not secure (yet). Toshok noted that,".. a full security audit has not happened, and that by visiting Silverlight sites you are downloading code that will execute on your system."  However, on Linux of course, most users don't run as root (SUDO doesn't auto-execute either) so the damage would be limited to the access of the user.

One of the things that I'm always been keen on asking Novell about in reference to their Microsoft related efforts is how close they are tracking the current leading edge of Microsoft's development. Since Silverlight itself is not being developed in the open, Novell is essentially following Microsoft's development lead in making Moonlight compatable. It's a fact that Novell is aware of and they are trying to keep the gap as minimal as they can.

"Since we started working on Moonlight 2.0, Microsoft has released a beta of Silverlight 3.0,"Toshok explained. "The differences between 2.0 and 3.0 are much, much smaller than the differences between 1.0 and 2.0, and we've been keeping the 3.0 in mind when completing work on various 2.0 features."

Yes there is still a debate about the media codecs themselves which are still proprietary, even though Microsoft is making them freely available via Novell. Questions about Free Software purity aside, Moonlight is about enabling Linux users with the ability to view the same content as Windows users. With Moonlight in play, Microsoft can rightfully claim that Silverlight isn't just for Windows.

MonoDevelop on Mac OS X

Mono's chief developer Miguel Icaza has announced in a blog posting that a preview build of MonoDevelop that integrates with Mac OSX is now available. The preview release requires the latest version of Mono (Mono 2.4), the open source alternative to Microsoft's .Net framework, is installed. Michael Hutchinson, lead developer on the Mac OS X MonoDevelop notes that it will be possible to port ASP.NET MVC applications to the platform.

MonoDevelop is primarily an open source IDE for C# and Mono, the open source alternative to Microsoft's .NET framework. It has similar goals to the SharpDevelop project on which it was based. The current stable version of MonoDevelop is version 2.0 which was released in March alongside Mono 2.4.

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