Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono project, in an interview about the future of the free .Net-alternative, the Microsoft deal and basing a desktop on C#

Since the July of 2001 the Mono project has been working on offering a free alternative for Microsofts .Net. In 2004 version 1.0 was published, for a few months Mono 1.2 has been available. The project was initiated by Miguel de Icaza. Andreas Proschofsky spoke with him about the future of Mono, the competition and the Microsoft deal.Here you’ll find a german translation of this interview

derStandard.at: Since the last time we talked, you’ve finally released Mono 1.2, more than two years after 1.0 and quite a bit behind the original schedule. So: Are you sure that 2.0 will be a little bit closer to the proposed schedule?

Miguel de Icaza: Only death and taxes are sure in this life.

Currently, part of our struggle is what will be called Mono 2.0; The ASP.NET side of the house will be ready before Windows.Forms is ready.

So far we were trying to keep the Mono versions roughly similar to the NET versions, but it seems that this will not be a good long term strategy. For instance, we will have support for C# 3.0 long before the equivalent to .NET 3.0 even exists for Mono.

derStandard.at: What do you have in store for the next major release?

Miguel de Icaza: In terms of the API, we will make the core and ASP.NET be 2.0 implementations. Other pieces like 2.0 Windows.Forms will be part of a future release.

There are three major developments outside of the API tracking:

  • The Mono Debugger.
  • The Stetic GUI designer.
  • The MonoDevelop IDE reaching 1.0

One interesting bit is that all of those technologies will be tied in the 1.0 release of MonoDevelop.

For some people, the lack of a debugger has been a big turnoff and we hope to finally fix this problem.

derStandard.at: When do you plan to release MonoDevelop 1.0?

Miguel de Icaza: We do not have a definite date for MonoDevelop 1.0, but it should be sometime in the next six months.

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