MIX 2011: Mono: State of the Union

This session was delivered by Miguel de Icaza, VP developer Platform, Mono Team, Novell.

Miguel started by announcing the coming monospace conference: July 23 – July 25, in Boston, MA.

Then Miguel presented the different mono related projects and their status:

Mono includes Mono for iPhone (MonoTouch), MonoMac, Mono for Android, MonoDevelop IDE for Mac and Windows, Moonlight 4 (mono based Silverlight) and more.

Miguel did thanked Microsoft for the large amounts of code it contributed to the mono project. MEF, DLR and F# are core contributions from Microsoft, among other things.

Then, Miguel talked about the “Compiler as a Service” APIs that is available on mono. Basically what it gives you is an evaluate command that can compile and run a C# string at runtime.

Next Miguel talked about the Manos de Mono project which goes along the lines that creating more than a single thread per CPU is a waste.

The next subject of the talk was MonoTouch, which is a .NET and C# implementation for iPhone and iPad. It includes all the standard .NET APIs, but instead of implementing WinForms or WPF on the apple devices, they simply created a managed wrapper around existing Apple UI frameworks.

MonoDroid is a .NET and C# implementation for Android, and similarly to MonoTouch, the Android UI was managed wrapped.

That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.