Windows Developer Power Tools

18.4 Building and Deploying Cross-Platform .NET Applications with Mono

Microsoft’s .NET Framework enables you to create terrific applications that solve any number of business problems for your customers. You can provide great value by rapidly solving difficult problems with custom-built software. Furthermore, you have the potential to reuse large amounts of your systems in subsequent projects.

But what do you do if a prospective customer is running on a Linux or OS X platform? Do you simply write off an entire business opportunity?

You don’t have to if you use Mono, an open source framework capable of supporting applications on a variety of operating systems. Mono is a development framework that is almost completely compliant with the ECMA standard defining Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Mono enables developers to deploy existing Windows-based .NET applications to Linux or Mac OS X. In addition, Mono applications provide a powerful new environment for creating applications for Unix and Linux from scratch.

Mono was initially announced as an open source project under sponsorship by Ximian in 2001. The first 1.0 release occurred in 2004, after almost three years of work by hundreds of developers.

Mono is composed of three major components: the core, the GNOME/OSS development stack, and the Microsoft compatibility stack.

Mono at a Glance
Tool	Mono
Version covered	1.1.15 (April 18, 2006)
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