There has been some great work for the DLR (rides on Mono/CLR) and it'd make a fantastic platform on which to develop new languages.

But the licensing/patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft only applies to Novell and its customers. Microsoft reserves the right to sue anyone else for violating its patents. Unfortunately I think Novell got little from this deal. And worse yet, I think it'd be irresponsible for any organization (other than Novell or its customers) to develop anything mission critical on Mono. See Wikipedia's entry for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

Here's the relevant link repackaged to get around the parens problem. http://tinyurl.com/4epkag

Heh. A site written in a lisp-variant has trouble with parens. :-)

Could someone please actually respond to this comment? It was downmodded, but checking the url at Wikipedia (his url gets screwed up because it contains parens)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Mono_and_Microsoft.E2.80.99s_patents

And it looks like the Windows Forms and such stuff may be a patent problem.

On the other hand, "may be a patent problem" is an appropriate description of any recently written software.

I would expect Microsoft to fulfill its "Linux violates n Microsoft patents" threat before it does the same for Mono: Each programmer using Mono enhances the .NET ecosystem, while each Linux installation degrades Windows' market share.

Mono is a very developer friendly open source project as well.

They have great info on how to contribute.

I actually submitted my first open source project patch to mono this weekend! If you are looking for a project to contribute to, I can't recommend mono enough.

Does anyone actually use mono?

F-Spot, Banshee, and people who want cross-platform Gtk+ apps written in C# as opposed to Python or C++.

Joel uses it for the Linux and Mac versions of FogBugz.

Yes. A lot of flagship GNOME products, in particular, and lots of other people. Mono is cool, man.

I think Miguel's post is far more informative: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Oct-06.html

Would anyone miss mono if it disappeared? I don't think I've ever installed something that required it.

Or is Mono much more popular for desktop/gui applications on GNOME? (Not my world)

I think Beagle's in Mono...I know that a number of GNOME apps depend on it.

I would miss Mono.

Aside from Second Life (and Novell), are there any big deployments using Mono?

It's sad that Microsoft made someone else reimplement all this because of licensing restrictions. I mean, it's 2008. What, exactly, does Microsoft have to gain by keeping their language and runtime code proprietary, especially if they are letting someone else reimplement it for other platforms? I bet there would be more Mono deployments if the industry had not already been bitten once by Java's fragmentation.

I feel sort of bad for the Mono team; despite all the hard work put into this release to get .NET 2.0 support implemented, they're still, what? 1.5 versions behind?

When I last toyed with learning ASP.NET 2.0 quite some time ago, I decided I'd wait until Mono 2 was released and there was a solid version of MonoEdit so I wouldn't be stuck working in a VM. That seems like a really long time ago...

Mono is not far behind. .NET 3.5 still uses the 2.0 runtime. Many features like LINQ are supported. Web frameworks like ASP.NET MVC can run on Mono. Mono has Gtk for UI development on Linux. Creating a modern replacement for Gtk like WPF on Windows would have to involve the whole Gnome community. Other newer .NET libraries are mainly for large business use. And Mono also has it's own features like DTrace support on Solaris and OSX which Microsoft can't match on Windows.

Check out how old this message is. It just floored me how long C# has been around.

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2000-12/msg00437.html

...if you play Mono, you never can tell where the music is really coming from...

(Too bad for Monopoly that Stereo is a well-established standard already...)

upmod if you tried mono, liked it, but just couldn't stand seeing files with .exe and .dll extensions on your linux box

While I agree with your sentiment, could we not start with the "upmod if" posts?