The 1.1.13 version of Mono has also been released. This version will be shipped with Novel/Suse Enterprise products. It also serves as a feature freeze point for the upcoming major 1.2 release, with the exception of System.Windows.Forms (SWF) and libgdiplus, which are still being developed. The 1.1.13 branch will also receive back-ports of all bug fixes until it is replaced with the 1.2 version. 1.1.13 is mostly bug fixes (including hundreds in the SWF namespace). The main additions to this release are a completed 64 bit S390 port, an implementation of the new 2.0 System.Threading primitives, updates to System.Net.Mail and System.Net.Mime, and typed data returns for Sqlite 3. One major enhancement is the inclusion of a printing framework for SWF. This will not be really usable until Cairo is updated, but it is still a milestone I have been looking forward to seeing. More than 70 people worked on this release.

Scott Hanselman does podcasts and he did one on Mono at http://perseus.franklins.net/hanselminutes_0005.mp3. Even more interesting, he has a screencast that shows how to develop using Mono, then deploy on Windows, or develop on Windows, then run on Mono. The screen cast is at www.hanselman.com/blog/MonoAndItsManyFacetsScreencast.aspx. It is a small demo that uses only a simple console application, but if you have never seen a single .exe run on both Windows and Linux, it is worth checking out.

Mono on Mac on Intel
Does Mono work on the new Intel based Macs? Not very well, but it will. Currently, only the JIT compiler works, and even that does not support garbage collection, so most applications will crash after running a while. There are issues with stack definitions breaking calls to DLLs, and many install issues. Lack of access to Intel-based Macs is also delaying the porting process, but the Mono team is beginning to get more access to Intel-based Macs. Fixing all of this will take several months, but it is being worked on, and Mono will soon run on Intel-based Macs.

For Macs running on PowerPC, there is an open source (LGPL) framework called Dumbarton, which bridges Objtive-C and C#. It was written by imeem in response to a need they had while writing an application with a complex user interface that needed to run on both Macs and Windows. The application connects to a server and provides a wide range of services, such as blogging, podcasting, chat, photo sharing, and others. They felt that the user interface for such an application would be complex enough using a native look and feel, without having users deal with a non-native look and feel. They needed a version of Mac, and Windows, but were OK with the Linux version using the Mono SWF interface. Their solution was to use C# on the server back end, and to put as much code as possible into this back end. They then wrote separate interfaces for Windows and Mac. They wrote the Windows interface in C# using Visual Studio, SWF, and the Mac interface in Coca using Xcode and Objective C. They then wrote a framework called Dumbarton (named after a bridge in the San Francisco area) that connects the Objective C user interface to the C# back end. There is an interesting article on it in at http://developer.apple.com/business/macmarket/imeem.html. (The imeem application is free, and can be downloaded from their home page www.imeem.com). They have also released the framework under the LGPL, and you can download the source from their developers page, as well as find out more about it, at www.imeem.com/developers.aspx.

Pnet
The new version of Portable.NET contains a lot of fixes and enhancements in all parts of the project, over 150 in all. More than a third of the changes were in System.Windows.Forms, which received more than 50 changes in this version. One big change is that gcc4 can now be used for building Portable.NET.

A complete list of the improvements and downloads of the programs and source code can be found at http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/2006-January/000162.html.

Odds and Ends
LSharp is an open source Lisp-like interpreter for .NET. It started out running on Microsoft.NET 1.1, but has been updated to .NET 2.0, and now runs on Mono, with a few rough spots. More information, downloads, and tutorials on using Lisp can be found at www.lsharp.org.

Sharpdevelop released beta 1 of SharpDevelop2. One big change is that this version is released under the LGPL, not the GPL you would expect. The reason for this is that Sharpdevelop is meant to be very extensible, and LGPL allows extensions to be closed source. Other additions are support for code coverage and the Mono GAC. It can be downloaded from www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Download. It supports the .NET 1.1 Framework, but requires the 2.0 Framework to be installed.