From SitePoint's Tech Times email newsletter:
After years of pointing out the Mono project as a beacon of hope to those who want to enjoy the benefits of ASP.NET without suffering Microsoft lock-in, I had honestly given up hope of ever seeing this open source effort bear practical fruit. Imagine my surprise last week when Beta 1 of the Mono Project was released!
I haven't yet had time to install and play with the beta, but that's definitely high on my to-do list. Downloads are available for Windows and Mac OS X, as well as all popular Linux platforms.
For those who don't know, Mono is an open source project that aims to create cross-platform versions of:
- a C# compiler
- the Common Language Runtime (CLR)
- most of the .NET Framework's class library, including ADO.NET and ASP.NET
Most notably for Web developers, ASP.NET (including both Web Forms and Web Services) is advertised as being fully functional with this release! Yes, now is the time to start testing your ASP.NET applications on Mono. It'll be much easier to get any bugs fixed now, in the final push before release, than it will once 1.0 hits the streets.
The Mono project, which is sponsored by Novell (who bought out Ximian last year), have two more beta releases planned before the final release of Mono 1.0 on or about June 30, 2004.
Posted by at May 12, 2004 10:32 AM