Novell Ships Mono Development Tool

Novell delivers MonoDevelop, a development environment for Mono.

MonoDevelop 1.0, a Novell development tool and part of the company's project to deliver an open-source platform compatible with Microsoft's .Net Framework, is now available, the company announced March 12.

MonoDevelop enables developers to more easily create Mono applications. It supports Microsoft Visual Studio project formats along with C# and other programming languages, and the software enables developers to write desktop and ASP.Net Web applications on Linux and Mac OS X.

Novell officials said MonoDevelop will make it easier for developers to port .Net applications created with Visual Studio to Linux and Mac OS X and to maintain a single code base for all three platforms.

In a blog post from February 7, Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms at Novell and creator of Mono, said, "Our recent efforts to better support the OSX stem from our belief that some Windows -expats' will want to continue building .NET applications using the Mac. And once they have updated their applications to run on the Mac, the code will run just as well on Linux."

De Icaza also said: "Eventually, we would also like to bring MonoDevelop to Windows. Not to compete with SharpDevelop as they are focused on being a great IDE [Integrated Development Environment] for Window developers. Our focus will be in bringing Stetic (our Gtk# GUI designer) to developers building cross platform applications."

Mono 2.0 Beta

In addition to MonoDevelop, Novell also announced the availability of the Mono 2.0 beta, the latest version of the open-source, cross-platform .Net development framework implementation that allows software developers to efficiently build .Net applications for Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris and Windows. The Mono 2.0 beta includes support for Microsoft .Net 2.0.

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The Mono 2.0 beta includes a .Net 3.5 preview in addition to a .Net 2.0 profile, plus improved Mac support and a Mono migration analysis tool that helps customers determine their Linux readiness for .Net migration, Novell said.

"MonoDevelop continues Mono's innovation to make it far easier to build and develop applications on Linux and other platforms, allowing developers to get software to market faster and more cost effectively," de Icaza said. "The Mono project is growing to become the leading choice for the development of Linux applications through the work of a community dedicated to helping people migrate their existing knowledge and applications to Unix."

Meanwhile, Jason Alexander, chief technology officer of Telligent Systems, an early user of the technology, said, "Using Novell's Mono framework for our new Graffiti CMS product, we're now able to reach a customer base that we couldn't access before. Our partnership empowers the small business owner and everyday individual to create and maintain their own social networks and blogs with ease. Mono also enables Graffiti to run entirely on other operating systems with little to no customizations to our source code, and we're very excited about that."

MonoDevelop 1.0 and the Mono 2.0 beta can be downloaded beginning March 14 at http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html .