It is fantastic to see that Mono is keeping up with the CLR / .Net evolution. They just reached the feature complete state for their C# 4.0 compiler, as reported by Marak Safar from the Mono compiler team.

Optional parameters, named arguments, dynamic binding and of course covariance and contravariance. I’m especially excited about the last one as it will help a lot with complex generics-based frameworks. That said, dynamic binding remains the most general purpose feature in this version.

This was slightly unexpected, but I’m happily surprised that Miguel de Icaza will host an official session about Mono during this years Microsoft PDC in Los Angeles. Usually, we only see Microsoft employees presenting at this conference.

Perhaps Microsoft is warming up to Mono – it would allow development of .Net clients on other platforms – convenient for their new Cloud Services push?

It’s a great day for cross platform .Net as Mono v2.0 is released. Now fully stocked with ADO.NET 2.0 / ASP.NET 2.0 / Windows Forms 2.0 as well as a C# 3.0 compiler and LINQ support. In other words, there are also some .Net 3.5 bits in there.

It also ships with a nice collection of ADO.NET providers that are not available in the Microsoft distribution, as well as the usual non-Windows native goodies.

Interesting to see that they are also bundling the C5 Generic Collection library, indicating that this is probably an area where the base class libraries need more work, features and standardization.

I’ve just noticed a nice little article about the importance of Mono (.Net on other platforms). Mono is one of my favorite open source projects, not to mention the significance I feel it has in the .Net domain. Have a look.

Paco Martinez over at Mono has created an easy to use Gtk# and Glade# installer that not only installs all the required files, but also includes a VS.NET 2003 compliant SDK with project templates, documentation and samples.

The ultimate goal of this installer is to provide the best development experience when creating Gtk# applications in a Windows development environment.

So if you are looking to develop cross platform .Net Windows applications, or you simply want to give a WinForms alternative a try; head over to this blog posting for download information and additional resources.

It’s really cool to see how the CLR platform is catching on.

Mono, an Open Source implementation of .Net finally makes it to its first release, the big version 1.0. After years of development it’s nice to see the progress they’ve made.

Congratulations to the team.