Mono In 2011

In an year end post, Miguel de Icaza takes us through the major milestones for Mono in 2011. We present a summary here with the timeline.

Some of the major milestones for Mono in the last year -

• Feb - Mono 2.10 brings a host of new features including support for Google Native Client, a new profiler, better F# support and support for ASP.NET MVC3
• Mar – MonoMac 1.0 is released
• Apr - Mono For Android Debuts
• May – Novell (which was taken over by Attachmate last year) lays off the entire Mono development team. Xamarin is formed.
• July - SUSE signs an agreement with Xamarin giving a perpetual license to all Mono related Intellectual property and stewardship of the open source mono project. Xamarin takes over support for existing Enterprise Mono customers and starts selling Mono-based products, including the popular MonoTouch for iOS and Mono for Android.
• Aug – Mono 2.10.3, Xamarin’s first Mono release, comes out with support for Mac OSX Lion, some WCF improvements and GC fixes.
• Oct - Microsoft takes a dip into Mono by building Kinectimals for iOS
• Nov - Sony announces Play Station Suite built on top of Mono. Phalanger 3.0 gets released with support for Mono instead of needing a C++/CLI compiler
• Dec – CXXI brings advanced C++ interoperability to Mono

Other interesting developments -

• Unity with its 3D Game Engine platform built on top of Mono, continues to grow in popularity
• MonoDevelop goes from 2.4 to 2.8

What can we look forward to in 2012? Miguel says:

2012 will be a year dominated by our upcoming Mono release: Mono 2.12. It packs a year worth of improvements to the runtime, to our build process and to the API profiles.

Mono 2.12 defaults to the .NET 4.x APIs and include support for .NET 4.5.

This is going to be the last time that we branch Mono for these extended periods of time. We are changing our development process and release policies to reduce the amount of code that is waiting on a warehouse to be rolled out to developers.

Looks like exciting times ahead!