Mono 1.2 Released

Novell released Mono 1.2 at TechEd today. The main feature of 1.2 is support for System.Windows.Forms. The roadmap and previous releases indicate that 1.2 has a lot of other cool features, but it's hard to tell exactly what they are since the release notes apparently aren't available yet. UPDATE: The release notes are now available.

I even dug through the repository, but couldn't find any release notes. I'm sure it's just a matter of time. Until then, the release announcement on the Mono site says:

Mono 1.2 has been released.
Go to the downloads page to get a copy.
 

Hmm... 

There are some high level articles on eWeek and wwwCoder which parrot a press release, indicating Mono 1.2 has these features:

  • Support for the Microsoft Windows Forms API to more easily port .NET client-side applications to Linux.
  • Virtual machine upgrades
  • Enhanced Java support
  • Significant performance, memory consumption and stability improvements
  • Support for many .NET 2.0 features (seems like mostly generics support)

I get the feeling that the release was a little rushed to allow for an announcement at TechEd, and the docs aren't up to date. The Mono roadmap indicates the 1.2 release was supposed to have the following:

The Mono team is developing in parallel some features that wont make it to the 1.0 release in stable form. These will be the foundation for the 1.2 release. The focus of this release is to track the core API for the .NET Framework 2.0, but again, only a subset of the total framework will be available.

Mostly, Mono 1.2 consists of components that were not stable enough for Mono 1.0, but that would be mature at this point, plus the incorporation of some new features from Whidbey. In addition to the Mono 1.0 components, this release will add:

  • Generic types support: C# compiler, execution system and core class libraries (C# 2.0) 
  • System.Windows.Forms 1.1 support (Track Progress) 
  • Mono Debugger 
  • gtk# 2.0 (includes support for gtk 2.6)
  • New platforms: ARM, Itanium, s390, s390x.
  • Numerous scalability and performance enhancements

Mono 1.2 will also include assemblies from Whidbey (.NET 2.0) available as technology previews:

  • XML 2.0 (Track Progress)
  • ASP.NET 2.0 (Track Progress)
  • ADO.NET 2.0
  • Most of mscorlib and System.dll
  • Console and Serial ports support

I've been pretty impressed with Mono's winform support since the 1.1.8 release, so I'm looking forward to seeing how much better 1.2 is.

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