Mono Project To Deliver Bulk of .Net Framework Clone For Linux In September

At Web Services Edge East here, Ximian CTO and Mono Project leader Miguel de Icaza told attendees that the version 1.0 server-side components of the software will be delivered in September.

The Mono Project is a community initiative launched by Ximian to develop an open-source version of the Microsoft .Net development platform for Linux and Unix.

While noting that much of the code has already been released to the Web, the Mono Project will release next week an enhanced just-in-time compiler and support for the PowerPC, de Icaza said.

The Mono Project code includes a Common Language Infrastructure (CLI)-compliant executable system, C# just-in-time (JIT) compiler and currently supports x86, Sparc, StrongARM, MIPs and PPC architectures as well as the Linux, Solaris Unix, Windows and BSD operating systems.

There's more to come in the following months, the Mono Project leader said.

"We've been building a second-generation just-in-time [C#] compiler for the last six months and will release it for Linux and Solaris," he said. "The new JIT is just as fast as [the .Net compiler] 1.0 and is faster than the Linux compiler. We have an early Visual Basic.Net compiler, but it's not finished."

The Mono Project announced its intention to build the development platform 18 months ago following Microsoft's submission of the C# compiler and CLI code to the ECMA standards body.

The update on the Mono Project comes just one month before Microsoft launches a Visual Studio.Net development platform upgrade and just a day before Sun launched its GUI-based Sun ONE Web Services Platform Developer Edition here.

Shortly after the announcement of the Mono Project in 2001, Microsoft released a noncommercial implementation of C# and CLI on FreeBSD, another open-source operating system. The company's shared source initiative permits use of the code submitted to ECMA but only for noncommercial use.

It is not clear whether Microsoft will challenge the commercial implementation publicly or legally.

At the conference, one Visual Studio exec would not comment on legal strategy but asserted that Microsoft's toolset is the most full-featured for the Web services environment. "

I don't know about the legality, but whether a third party could keep feature parity [with Visual Studio] is a concern. It's an insurmountable problem [for the Mono Project]," Thom Robbins, a senior technology specialist for Microsoft, said during a panel at Web Services Edge East. "The chance that another company could reach feature parity and stay current with [Microsoft's Visual Studio platform] is extremely small. The CLI and C# is managed by ECMA, but the bulk of the value of the .Net framework is [Windows] Forms and that is not part of the standard."

The Mono Project is also working on ASP.Net- and Web forms-compliant features for the Mono platform but Microsoft won't have to worry about the Mono Project using Windows Forms. "We don't care about Windows Forms," de Icaza said. "We think it [stinks]."

Another Microsoft official said during the .Net panel that it's not likely Microsoft will offer support for Visual Studio.Net on non-Windows platforms but the availability of third-party .Net tools on other platforms may not be such a bad thing for customers--and the software giant itself.

"I'm not seeing a lot of demand" for .Net framework on non-Windows platforms," said Bob Familiar, an architectural engineer for Microsoft. "But in a lot of ways, it makes customers more comfortable so if they need it running on another platform, they could. We want to be a better player in the heterogeneous space."

Oddly enough, de Icaza said the Mono Project is aimed more at Web applications than Web services. "Mono is an implementation of the .Net Framework, not Visual Studio, Passport or .Net services. Web services can't run on Mono today," de Icaza told an audience gathered at the Hynes Convention center in Boston. "A lot of people are excited about Web services, but I don't know why. Web services don't have as much application as everyone makes it out to be. Bill Gates says everything will be Web services-based, but they're not as useful as everyone thinks."

De Icaza said that only about one-third of the Mono runtime will be included in an upcoming upgrade of Ximian's popular Evolution e-mail client that runs on leading Linux distributions. A future version will have more of the Mono code, he said.