After three years of hard work, Novell, the company that acquired Ximian a few months ago, has released version 1.0 of the open-source implementation of the .NET Framework. Using Mono, developers can write cross platform applications that will run not only on Windows systems, but also on Mac OS X, Linux, Unix. Mono includes a C# compiler, a .NET compatible runtime, and two different sets of APIs: a set that provides compatibility with Microsoft’s .NET Framework (including support for ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and a number of other components) and a set which offers a variety of Linux and Unix-specific features.
A changelog is not available on the site of Mono† release notes However. Since they are a bit long, we will suffice here with a summary of the possibilities of Mono 1.0:
- A cross platform ECMA CLI runtime engine.
- A cross platform IKVM Java runtime engine.
- C# 1.0 compiler.
- Development tool chain.
- The Gtk# 1.0 GUI programming toolkit.
- Mono-specific libraries.
- Third party convenience libraries bundled with the release.
- GNU Classpath for the CLI.
- Visual Basic runtime.
Class libraries implementing the .NET 1.1 profile.
[break]The Mono organization has made a number of downloads available for different operating systems. The most important ones are listed below, a complete overview of all downloads is here to find back:
| Version number | 1.0 |
| Operating systems | Windows 2000, Linux, Windows XP, Linux x86, macOS, Windows Server 2003 |
| Website | Mono |
| Download | |
| License type | GPL |