Ximian announced the launch of the Mono project, an effort to create an open source implementation of the .NET Development Framework. Mono includes: a compiler for the C# language, a runtime for the Common Language Infrastructure (also referred as the CLR) and a set of class libraries. The runtime can be embedded into your application. Mono has implementations of both ADO.NET and ASP.NET as part of its distribution. You can read our rationale for this project. If you have questions about the project, please read our list of Frequently Asked Questions or contact us. You might also want to Download the source for our work so far. Grab a snapshot of our current work, or browse the sources You might want to subscribe to our mono-list and mono-announce-list. There is also a forum at GotMono. You can contact the team at: mono-list@ximian.com In order to follow the process of the project and to learn more about the team members we have created the Mono Weekly News letter. Which archives can be found here. We have a Gtk# Wiki and a Mono Wiki
Mono Status
C# Compiler Self hosting on Linux
Self hosting on .NET.
JIT Linux/x86 working.
Interpreter Working:
Linux/x86, Linux/PPC, S390, StrongARM
In progress:
SPARC.
ASP.NET Webforms working
Classes All assemblies compile.
RSS feed:
Screenshots
@item May 6th, 2003: Mono 0.24 ships We have released Mono 0.24 which includes our new code generation engine. A list of the new features is available here. Packages for Windows, and various Linux distributions are available on our download page. We are shipping Gtk# and MonoDoc packages for the first time. @item Apr 21st, 2003: Virtuoso 3.0 ships. OpenLink's released their Virtuoso 3.0 database system. Virtuoso ships on Windows and Linux. On Linux they use Mono as their runtime to host C#, .NET and ASP.NET. Congratulations to OpenLink for their release. Virtuoso can be downloaded here and a demo is available here. OpenLink is contributing fixes and code to the Mono project on an ongoing basis. Jon Udell wrote a small entry @item Apr 19th, 2003: RelaxNG validating reader; Activities. Atsushi has created a RelaxNG validating XML reader. There is activity on the GotMono forums and the Gtk# Wiki @item Apr 11th, 2003: First Mono Book is out; Team pages. The first book to cover Mono is out. This book is currently only available in German, you can find it here We now have a page for the Mono Team where we include a list of some of the people who have made Mono possible. If you have CVS access, please update the page to include your information. @item Apr 5th, 2003: New compilation engine. The new Mono compilation engine has been placed on CVS, the details are here Zoltan has commited his typed allocation patches to CVS as well. @item Apr 3rd, 2003: NUnit 2.0 GTK# GUI; GtkMozEmbed; SWT# Gonzalo has checked in his Gtk#-based NUnit tool. Screenshots are here and here Mark has checked his bindings for Gtk-based Mozilla into CVS, module name: `GtkMozEmbed'. Read the details The SWT port to C# using Gtk is progressing. Screenshots are here. @item Mar 28th: Mono community site. www.gotmono.com has openend its door: Got Mono is a Mono Community site. @item Mar 25th: Second Mono Survey
What do you think about Mono? Is your company involved with the development and deployment of web applications? Is Linux becoming an important part of your company's business application strategy? Are you considering Mono for your next project? Would you like to shape the future of Mono and the use of Linux in business critical applications? If you answered yes to any of these questions, we would like to talk with you. If interested, please email us at mbadgett@ximian.com.
@item Mar 20th: Windows.Forms and Wine. Alexandre has provided a modified version of the GC system that will work with and Mono. See the mono-winforms-list. It is now possible to run our Win32-based implementation of Windows.Forms with Mono on Linux. @item Mar 7th: Mono 0.23 A new freshly baked release of Mono is available. Release notes are here. This is mostly a bug fix release. No new features. @item Mar 5th, 2003: Mono 0.22; MonoDoc 0.2; Debugger 0.2.1: Release-o-Rama. Mono 0.22 has been released. See the release notes. This is a bug fix release. A new preview of MonoDoc 0.2, the Mono Documentation browser has been released. Martin also announced a new release of the Mono Debugger (both GUI and command line). @item Mar 3rd, 2003: The Mono Hackers Hall Of Fame welcomes Zoltan Varga The Mono Hackers Hall Of Fame continues to show our appreciation to the excellent contributors that make mono:: a successful free software project. Zoltan has contributed significantly to Mono, with bug reports and bug fixes as well as pushing the envelope of the things that can be done in and with the mono runtime: the gcc-based ngen compiler, code coverage and more recently his work with Reflection.Emit that got mono to the point of running the IKVM Java virtual machine. @item Mar 2nd, 2003: New Mono mailing list. A new mailing list for Mono Development has been created. @item Feb 27th, 2003: Mono 0.21 released Mono 0.21 has been released. This is only a bug fix release. The release notes are available. Windows binary is available here @item Feb 25th, 2003: Mono 0.20 for Windows released; New Apache module released. Packages of Mono for Windows have been released. Thanks to Daniel, Johannes and Paolo for setting this up. Daniel has released a new version of his Mono Apache module that handles ASP.NET. The code is available at here Nick has posted an update on the progress on our regression tests. We are looking for more tests, and more volunteers to write them. Also, remember to contribute to the Gtk# documentation effort, momentum is picking up! See the entry for Feb 18th for more details. @item Feb, 23rd, 2003: Mono 0.20 released; Gtk# 0.8 released. Mono 0.20 has been released. Check out the release notes for an overview of the changes. You can get it here. There are no major features in this release, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements. Gtk# 0.8 has been released Important: The contributed binaries for Windows binaries of Mono 0.20 contain a virus. Please read this if you installed the binary. @item Feb 18th, 2003: Volunteers to document Gtk# With the availability of a documentation browser, we are looking for volunteers to help us complete the documentation of the Gtk# binding for Mono. Experience with Gtk is useful, but not mandatory. We have checked in stubs, and we have instructions, and resources to how to complete this process here. Mail the mono-docs-list@ximian.com for further discussion. @item Feb 14th, 2003: OpenGL# bindings for Mono; Mono Basic updates. Mark Crichton has completed his OpenGL/GLUT bindings for Gnome. A screenshot can be seen here. The bindings are available on the Mono CVS repository on the module `glgen'. This is a straight binding to the C API. Marco has posted an update on the current state of the free VB.NET compiler for Mono. We are looking for contributors and maintainers to the JavaScript compiler as well (Janet) @item Feb 12th, 2003: New assemblies, Gtk# stub documentation, Authenticode, Polish site Mono now distributes a few new assemblies: Mono.Security.Win32 as a layer to use the crypto functionality on Win32. The Mono.Posix assembly which contains functionality for taking advantage of Unix facilities. A Mono site in Poland. Stubs for the Gtk# documentation have been checked into CVS. If you want to contribute please read this message Mono development is moving quickly: Tim and Daniel have been improving the Oracle database provider and Sebastien Pouliot has got code signing to work using Authenticode with pure open source and managed code. Plenty of new VB.NET work from Marco (compiler) and Daniel (runtime). Also Jackson has resumed work on the IL assembler and the fully managed library to generate CIL images (Sergey wrote the first Mono.PEToolkit). @item Feb 11th, 2003: Mono Weekly News, New assemblies. Mono Weekly News: Includes a new interview, software announcements and the PHP/Mono integration. @item Feb 5th, 2003: MonoDoc 0.1 A preliminary release of the Mono Documentation Browser is now availble. Release notes @item Jan, 22th, 2003: Mono wins award, OpenLink releases Virtuoso. Mono won the `Best Open Source Project' award at the Linux World Expo. A description is here Open Link has a press release about Virtuoso 3.0: the first commercial product shipping that uses Mono. @item Jan, 20th, 2003: Mono 0.19 released; Screenshots page; Gtk# 0.7 Mono 0.19 has been released. Check out the release notes for an overview of the changes. You can get it here. There are no major features in this release, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements. We have now a new section with screenshots of various Mono applications. You can see there the new released Debugger, as well as the work in progress on the documentation browser. Gtk# 0.7 has been released @item Jan, 19th, 2003: Mono Debugger released. After six month of extensive development, Martin Baulig has released the first version of the Mono debugger. The Mono debugger is written in C# and can debug both managed and unmanaged applications, support for multiple-threaded applications and should be relatively easy to port to new platforms. Details of the release are available in post. The debugger contains both Gtk# and command line interfaces. The debugging file format used in Dwarf (its already supported by our class libraries and the Mono C# compiler; To debug C applications, you need a recent GCC, or to pass the -gdwarf-2 flag to gcc). @item Jan, 17th, 2003: DB2 provider, MacOS X Christopher Bockner has contributed a DB2 System.Data client. MacOS X support on the runtime has been integrated into the distribution, and MCS works with it. Zoltan has managed to get IKVM (a Java VM for .NET) to run with Mono. The HelloWorld.class runs with the Mono runtime. @item Jan, 13th, 2003: Mono 0.18 released Mono 0.18 has been released. Check out the release notes for an overview of the changes. You can get it here. @item Jan 10th, 2003: Mono Weekly News. A new issue of the Mono Weekly News has been published. Check out the Crypto status page that Sebastien has put together. @item Jan 3rd, 2003: Glade#, Code Coverage, Apache, MBas, Debugger. Rachel has made Glade# use attributes so binding C# widgets to the designed widgets is now easier than ever. Alp has improved this to use implicit names as well. Martin's Mono debugger now has support for multi-thread debugging. Special feature: breakpoints can be defined in a per-thread basis now. Daniel López has checked in his Apache module to integrate Mono and Mono's ASP.NET support as an Apache module. Gonzalo has folded his new Mono hosting classes into this module (they are now shared between XSP and mod_mono). You can get the mod_apache from CVS (module name: mod_mono). Mono Basic improvements: Marco has added support for more statements on the grammar. Zoltan has posted his Code Coverage analysis tool for Mono. @item Dec 17th, 2002: Mono: Commercial uses. Tipic today announced their work on porting their Instant Messaging Server platform to run on Mono. Winfessor also announced the availability of their Jabber SDK to run on Mono. Also two weeks ago we mentioned OpenLink Software's announcement of their product, also using Mono. @item Dec 10th, 2002: Gtk# 0.6 released; Mono 0.17 packages for Windows and Debian. Mike Kestner announced Gtk# 0.6. This new release includes many new features and bug fixes, and is the perfect companion to the Mono 0.17 release. Johannes has contributed a Windows-ready package of Mono 0.17, and its available from our download page. Alp Toker has Debian packages @item Dec 9th, 2002: Mono 0.17 has been released Mono 0.17 has been released. Check out the release notes for a more detailed list. You can get it here. Many new features as well as plenty of bug fixes. Many new System.Data providers and a more mature System.Web (ASP.NET) which can now be hosted in any web server. A simple test web server to host asp.net has been released as well. This version also integrates Neale's s390 port. This release also includes a new exception handling system that uses the gcc exception information that vastly improves our internalcall speed (15% faster mcs compilation times). @item Dec 8th, 2002: VB.NET, Oracle Provider. Marco has got the Mono Basic compiler up to speed (support for classes, modules, expressions, object creation, method invocation, local variables, and some statements). The compiler is based on the work from Rafael Teixeira on MCS. Screenshots: in Windows doing Windows.Forms and in Linux doing VB with Gtk# (courtesy of Alp). Daniel Morgan has checked in his Oracle provider to the CVS repository as well. @item Nov 27th, 2002: Press release, tutorials, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, Magazine. The Penguin Takes Flight: an article written by Erick Schonfeld appears on the December issue of Business 2.0 magazine. OpenLink and Ximian made joint announcement on the plans of OpenLink to ship their Virtuoso server on Unix using Mono. Martin Willemoes's GNOME.NET tutorial is now available from the main Mono site. This tutorial is a collaborative effort to teach developers how to use Mono to create Mono applications using Gtk# Dennis Hayes has posted and update on the work to get Windows.Forms working on Mono. There is a new test application that people can use to test their controls. If you are interested in working on Windows.Forms, you can participate in the mono-winforms mailing list Brian Ritchie has been working on an ADO.NET data layer and an application server for Mono. Dan Morgan has checked in his Oracle provider, and Tim Coleman continues to work on the TDS implementation of the data classes. The rest of the team has been working on bug fixing in the runtime, the compiler, and the class libraries. Also, compilation speed has increased recently by performing a number of simple optimizations in the compiler. @item Nov 19th, 2002: Crypto update; Books; Gtk# Datagrid; .NET ONE Slides Sebastien has got DSA and RSA signatures working as well as RSA encryption. We now distribute Chew Keong TAN's BigInteger classes. Brian has contributed a System.Data multiplexor in Mono, it can be found in the Mono.Data assembly. The details of this new technology are here. It works in Mono and the .NET Framework. Larry O'Brien has announced the candidate book for Thinking in C#. The book is Mono-friendly. Another book that covers mono (available in German only) is here. Dan Morgan has implemented a DataGrid widget for Gtk#, you can see Windows screenshots for it here and here. Slides from the Mono developers for the .NET ONE conference are available now: A couple of other presentations from Miguel's trip to Europe are available here in Open Office file format. @item Nov 8th, 2002: Mono s390, Database work, new JIT updates. Neale Ferguson has contributed RPM packages of Mono for the Linux/s390. Tim Coleman posted an update on the improvements in the System.Data The new JIT engine can run 72 out of our 154 tests for the virtual machine, and it also got exception support this week. @item Nov 1st, 2002: TDS, Crypto, Gtk#, Winforms, bug fixes. Tim's SqlClient is now capable of communicating with the Microsoft SQL server using the TDS protocol. A screenshot showing a sample client running with Gtk# on Windows is shown here Sebastien has made all symetric ciphers functional on all supported modes; All the classes in Security.Cryptography are present and the X590 certificates are now in too. Jackson has been working on the Security classes. Many bug fixes all over the place: class libraries (Dick, Piers, Ville, Zoltan, Gonzalo, Dan, Atsushi, Nick, Phillip), compiler, runtime engine. A big thank goes for everyone who has been providing bug reports for us to track down. Gaurav has been working on multiple WebControls. Gonzalo migrated the ASP.NET engine to use POST for interaction. In the Gtk# land saw the integration of gda, gnome-db and GStreamer bindings. Windows.Forms classes now build on Linux and Windows, check out the status pages for areas of collaboration. @item Oct 24th, 2002: S390 support, XSP/ASP.NET, Win32 contributors, TDS. Today Neal Ferguson's support for the IBM S390 was checked into CVS. The XSP processor has been fully integrated into the System.Web assembly, and Gonzalo has finished the hosting interfaces in Mono. This means that it is possible to embed ASP.NET with the same APIs used in Windows, and is possible to easily embed it with Apache for example. The XSP module has now become a shell for testing the System.Web classes. We are looking for contributors that know Win32 to contribute to the Windows.Forms implementation. If you want to help write some controls using the Win32 API, get in touch with our new mono-winforms-list@ximian.com list mailing list. Tim's TDS System.Data set of classes can now talk to SQL servers using the TDS protocol (version 4.2) with connection pooling. Currently it can connect, run transactions, update/insert/delete, and read some types. A data adapter is also coming soon. @item Oct 21th, 2002: Crypto, Winforms list, Database, GConf, Debugger. Sebastien Poliot has made a lot of progress, he reports that DES and TripleDES have been fixed; Rijndael and CFB modes still have problems in some configurations and some areas that are not supported by the .NET framework. Last week we created a new mailing list to discuss the Mono Winforms implementation. Tim has started a full C# implementation of the TDS protocol and the providers, and Brian continues his work on his ODBC binding. Rachel Hestilow has also checked in a binding for GConf. This binding is unique in that it uses some features in the CLI to support complex data types, and allows the user to keep only one representation of the types instead of two (the master types is defined in CLI-land). Also Property Editors (shot) simplify the creation of user interfaces that bind their configuration to backend keys, following the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Martin is now on vacation, but before leaving he produced a number of documents detailing the state of the debugger. The major missing feature is full support for debugging unmanaged applications (it requires dwarf-2 handlers for types). We will do some polishing of the user interface (new shot) to expose the existing and rich functionality to the users and try to release a preview of the debugger at the same time as Mono 0.17. @item Oct 14th, 2002: Crypto, Database work, Debugger, Documentation. Brian, Daniel and Rodrigo have been busy working on the ODBC provider for Mono. Daniel posted some updates. Brian posted details about the ODBC.NET provider. Also Sebastien Pouliot has been improving the various cryptographic classes in Mono, something that we had not done in quite some time. We are looking for a way to handle big-nums. We need either a managed or unmanaged set of classes for handling large numbers, and some volunteers to expose this functionality to C# (Either as an internal assembly, or as a set of P/Invoke, Internal call wrappers). Martin has got our debugger to support adding breakpoints at file/line combos. This was more complex than generic breakpoints in routines, because these breakpoints are set on routines that probably have not been JITed just yet. Martin's focus now is on stabilizing our debugger and aim for a public release of it. We have also imported the ECMA documentation into a separate module, and with the help from Scott Bronson we will have the necessary XSLT tools to finish our native documentation browser for Mono. This together with the work from Adam will be the foundation for the Mono Documentation Tools. @item Oct 9th, 2002: Various Mono updates. Brian Ritchie, Daniel Morgan, Rodrigo Moya and Ville Palo have been working on various database providers. The MySQL has seen a lot of work, and a new ODBC provider is now on CVS and more extensive regression tests have been checked in. Dick Porter is our background hero and keeps fixing the low-level bugs in the portability layer. Now the Mono handle daemon should be a lot more robust and will no longer leave IPC regions. Gonzalo Paniagua has initiated the migration of XSP into the System.Web class libraries now that we have a complete HttpRuntime implementation. This means that you are able to embed the ASP.NET processor into any web server you want. This also includes support for the system-wide configuration file `machine.config'. Martin Baulig has been busy with the Mono Debugger, you can see how it looks here and here. Now local variables and breakpoints are supported, and we are working on the UI elements to simplify their use (as seen on the screenshot). Gtk# has seen a lot of activity specially as we start to build larger applications. Vladimir Vukicevic, Kristian Rietveld, Rachel Hestilow, Mike Kestner and Miguel de Icaza have been busy improving it. mPhoto which is a Photo management application for Mono and Gtk# is seen here. Chris Toshok the man behind LDAP in Evolution continues to work on the Mono.LDAP# implementation. Dietmar Maurer and Paolo Molaro are still busy working on our new optimized JIT/ATC engine and are making great progress. The code base has been designed to ease the implementation of more advanced compiler optimizations, and optimizations can be chosen individually so they can be tuned for a particular processor, or use profile-based information to improve the performance. @item Oct 1st, 2002: Mono 0.16 released; Debugger updates. Mono 0.16 has been released. Source and RPMs are available. The release notes are here. Martin's debugger can debug both managed and unmanaged code. Recently Martin added support for locals, parameters, and breakpoints on top of the existing infrastructure (his debugger supported instruction-level and source-code level single-stepping). @item Sep 19th, 2002: Mono Survey. Help us plan for the future of Mono by filing out the First Mono Survey @item Sep 17th, 2002: Mono Hackers Hall of Fame: Sergey Chaban The Mono Hackers Hall Of Fame continues to show our appreciation to the excellent contributors that made mono:: a successful free software project. This time the Hall of Fame welcomes Sergey Chaban. Sergey has been a long time contributor to the project, from the early work on the class libraries that were critical to Mono's origin: every time you use a Hashtable in Mono, it runs Sergey's code, to the low-level optimizations on the JIT engine and to his work on ILASM and the PEToolkit. @item Sep 16th, 2002: Documentation Tools, ILASM, Debugger, Mono LDAP, Winforms Adam Treat has started moving the documentation universe again. We have a new strategy to document our APIs (given that we have chosen not to document the code inline). This includes the use of a master reference file that will hold the entry points to document. All master files for our assemblies have been checked into CVS now. Sergey Chaban's Mono.PEToolkit and ILASM tools have been checked into CVS. Although ILASM is old and will soon be updated, we wanted to get the build issues sorted out. Martin Baulig's Mono Debugger is still on its early stages, but you can run and run step by step your C# code and C code (including the Mono runtime). Dwarf-2 is required to compile your code. The regular step, step-into, and assembly-level step and step-into are supported. And comes with a Gtk# UI. The debugger is written mostly in C# with some C glue code. Most of the work is on the engine, we will be working on making a good UI in the future. Chris Toshok of the Hungry Programmer's fame has checked in Mono.Directory.LDAP, a C# wrapper for the LDAP libraries. This is the substrate for implementing the System.DirectoryServices assembly. Andrew has also continued with some of the cryptographic classes implementation. After much public debate, we have chosen a new strategy to implement winforms. Implementing a Gtk, Qt or Aqua based version of Winforms was going to be almost as complex as implementing Wine itself. So the new strategy is to only roll out a WineLib-based implementation. @item Sep 4th, 2002: .NET One 2002 Program available The .NET ONE 2002 conference in Frankfurt is now available. Paolo will be talking about the Mono JIT and embedding the Mono runtime in your Windows and Linux applications. Mike Kestner will talk about Gtk# and the automatic binding generator used by Gtk# and Miguel will be talking about the Mono project on Monday's keynote and on the Mono C# compiler on Tuesday. @item Sep 3rd, 2002: Apache integration Sterling announced an Apache module that hosts Mono, and allows CIL code to run from within Apache, giving the module access to the Apache runtime. This uses the Mono embedding API. @item Aug 24th, 2002: Gtk# 0.4 released Shortly after Mono 0.15 was released a fresh version of Gtk# was announced. @item Aug 23rd, 2002: Mono 0.15 released Mono 0.15 has been released. Source and RPMs are available. The release notes are here @item Aug 21th, 2002: Portable.NET encodings integrated into Mono. Rhys Weatherley has contributed the Portable.NET encoders to the Mono class libraries. This is a great step towards cooperation between these projects. Thanks to Paolo for doing the merger on our side. His encoders are more complete than the iconv-based approach that mono used, which was unreliable under certain circumstances. @item Aug 20th, 2002: Remoting work, Resources, SPARC checkins, ADO.NET San Francisco: August 14th. Linux World Expo. Mark Crichton has checked in his patches to get the SPARC port on par with the PPC port. Dick has checked-in the resource reader and resource writers to the class libraries, and Dietmar checked in the C# support code for the remoting infrastructure. More work on System.Data: the LibGDA (our OleDB backend) based providers are quickly maturing, and recently they executed their first query. @item Aug 13th, 2002: MCS news, Gtk# progress, Windows.Forms, ADO.NET Martin Baulig has been fixing all the known bugs in the C# compiler and now has moved into improving the compilation speed and the generated code quality of MCS. Today we got a 50% speedup in the bootstrap of MCS going from 24 seconds to 12 seconds. Gtk# has been making a lot of progress, some interesting corner cases are now supported:, you can now create canvas items as well as using the tree widget. Here is a shot of MonoCIL. On the runtime front, focus has been on improving remoting support, exception handling, as well as completing the support for structure marshaling. Patrik is also back in action: the HttpRuntime infrastructure is rapidly improving, and Gonzalo is working into moving XSP into our main class library and providing the missing pieces to integrate with Patrik's code. Dennis and his team are working on a WineLib-based implementation of Windows Forms to guarantee that the corner cases of Windows.Forms can be handled, and we are back on track again. A lot more work on the ADO.NET and WebServices has also been checked into CVS. @item Aug 1st, 2002: Mono Hackers Hall of Fame The Mono Hackers Hall Of Fame has been started to show our appreciation to the excellent contributors that made mono:: a successful free software project. The first, deserved, entry goes to Nick Drochak, who joined us in the first days of Mono and built the testing infrastructure for the C# assemblies, fixed tons of bugs and even adventured himself in the lands of the C runtime. His work is invaluable for keeping Mono on the right track through the daily changes in the codebase.

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