By Ryan Paul
October 06, 2008 - 07:10PM CT

The Mono project, which builds a cross-platform open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, has announced the availability of version 2.0. This milestone release delivers compatibility with .NET 2.0 and C# 3.0 on a broad range of platforms and architectures.

The Mono project was first conceived by GNOME cofounder Miguel de Icaza as a means of accelerating desktop Linux application development and enabling Windows developers to bring some of their existing skills and code to the Linux platform. Although the Mono project has generated some controversy and has received criticism from a small but vocal cadre of Linux users, the development framework has been enthusiastically embraced by a rapidly growing number of application developers.

This release includes compilers for C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 8. It comes with a comprehensive set of Microsoft-compatible APIs, including a cross-platform implementation of Windows.Forms 2.0 for desktop application development. Mono 2.0 also includes its own desktop API stack based around open-source technologies like GTK+ and Cairo.

The C# compiler is greatly improved and now delivers support for Language Integrated Query (LINQ) functionality and expression trees. In addition to adding new features and fixing many bugs in the compiler, the developers also overhauled some of the internals to improve support for anonymous methods.