This month I'll discuss MonoDevelop, a Gtk#- based, cross-platform version of SharpDevelop; Mono version 0.31 and Portable.NET 0.64; LDAP; and a Mono developer meeting in Boston. Additionally, Mono's System.Windows.Forms (SWF) achieves a major milestone by running with the standard version of Wine.

'It looks as if Mono is going to get a lot more manpower,' writes Dennis Hayes. 'If this translates into more code, Mono could be entering a whole new era. Novell's acquisition of Ximian has been very good for the project, and Novell seems to be true to their word about keeping open source open,' he adds, before discussing Mono's 0.30 release System.Windows. Forms (SWF) implementation changes, and some other ways that Novell has helped Mono and open source.

As Microsoft looks nervously on, Miguel de Icaza and his team of core developers continue to make great strides with their implementation of the CLI, 'Mono' - a free implementation of the .NET Development Framework. While Redmond sees the benefit to them in more implementations of the common runtime, it's maybe not so easy to stand by and watch a Linux-loving group of codeheads achieve the wholesale duplication of Windows APIs.

The open source community has generated a number of items this month: the Portable.NET System. Windows.Forms (SWF) programming contest has been extended; both Portable.NET and Mono have released new versions (Portable.NET v0.6.2, and Mono v0.30); .NET programs can now be executed on PlayStation 2 and Xbox; and Novell is joining the ECMA committee. I will also discuss the importance of supporting languages such as SML and Mercury.

Novell and Mainsoft have committed programming resources to Mono; Mono has released version 0.29, adding Unicode support from IBM. Portable.NET has made progress on WinForms, including multidocument interface (MDI) applications using the XWindows library.

There are several big events to report on this month. Novell has bought SUSE, the Linux distributor. DotGNU has released the version 0.1 CD, and Mono has released two roadmaps (one for developers, one for users). Finally, Microsoft has put up grant money to support experiments with Rotor, the Microsoft open source version of .NET.

In the March issue of .NET Developer's Journal Miguel de Icaza, project leader for the Mono project, wrote an article introducing Mono. In the same issue Dennis Hayes showed us how we could download and evaluate Mono. Since then a lot has happened...

Developers evaluating Mono need to know two things: how to download Mono, and what its capabilities are. Mono can be downloaded in several different forms; I will describe when using each form makes sense. More important, I will discuss which parts of .NET Mono can support now, and which it will support in the near future.

In July 2001 we announced the launch of the Mono Project ­ an effort to build an open-source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework using the technical documents that Microsoft submitted to ECMA (the European Computer Manufacturers Association) for standarization.