Novell Opens Up Mono 1.2 Beta Program

Published: April 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week at LinuxWorld in Boston, Novell had Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Gnome, Ximian, and Mono and for the past several years an employee of Novell's, on hand to launch the beta of the Mono 1.2 open source implementation of the .NET protocol and runtime environment.

With Mono 1.2, the environment now supports an application programming interface called Windows.Forms, a common method used by Windows developers working with Microsoft's ASP.NET tools to create GUI screens for their applications. "About 40 percent of new server applications and about 45 percent of new desktop applications are built using Windows.Forms functionality," explained de Icaza, who is probably one of the most animated and excited people in IT who wants to evangelize the Mono tools as a coding environment of the future. That is, of course, de Icaza's job, since he is vice president of developer platforms at Novell.

But, alas, Mono 1.2 is still in beta. "The software is feature complete, but we know it has bugs," he said with complete honesty and no shame--refreshing in any IT executive. "We are going to spend some time to shake them out." The beta release supports the .NET 1.1 framework and has partial support for the .NET 2.0 framework. The Mono framework clone runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD, and Windows platforms, and runs on X86, X64, Power, Sparc, and mainframe processors.

According to de Icaza, Novell eats what it cooks, and the Banshee music player, the F-spot photo management tool, and iFolder and Beagle desktop searches that are part of the upcoming SUSE Linux 10.0 commercial releases were all written using the Mono tools.