Novell Announces Availability of Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0

Adds support for Mac OS X and Mono on Windows; Faster deployment and ease-of-use for millions of .NET developers

29 July 2010

Novell today announced the availability of Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, the next generation of the first commercially available solution to facilitate the development of .NET applications for Linux*, UNIX* and Mac* OS X within Microsoft* Visual Studio*. A revolutionary add-in module for Microsoft's Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), Mono Tools for Visual Studio allows Microsoft .NET developers to utilize familiar Visual Studio environments to design, code and maintain multi-platform applications.

By significantly reducing the time and costs of multi-platform development, Mono Tools enables corporate developers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and development services providers to quickly and easily expand market opportunities and deployment options. It also enables .NET developers to leverage their existing skill-sets and an extensive .NET ecosystem of code, libraries and tools to develop or port applications to Linux, UNIX or Mac OS X.

New to Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0:

  • Support for Mac OS X: All of the features Mono Tools has provided for development, deployment and debugging of applications running on Linux are now fully available to developers targeting Mac OS X from directly within the IDE.
  • Support for Mono on Windows: Providing the simplest configuration for quickly getting a .NET developer working with Mono, Mono Tools makes it easy to test, debug and isolate issues on Mono without the overhead of switching between operating systems.
  • Faster time to deployment: By compressing resources and deploying only the files that have changed, time between building and testing is decreased multi-fold - greatly reducing the time a developer has to wait between writing and verifying a solution.

"With this next generation of Mono Tools for Visual Studio, Novell continues to offer customers, partners and developers the best experience in Visual Studio for targeting Linux, one of the world's leading deployment platforms," said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Developer Platform vice president at Novell. "Having the ability to work within a familiar operating system, leveraging existing skill-sets and tools, enables our customers and partners to streamline the development process to take applications to new markets in a more timely, cost effective manner."

Additional features available in Mono Tools 2.0 include a new debugger engine that enables developers to debug applications running on the latest versions of Mono on non-x86 hardware architectures, such as PowerPC and 390x. It also supports all current versions of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio 2010.

Because of its flexibility, Mono Tools enables developers to jump-start cross-platform .NET development with very little ramp up or new skills requirements. Furthermore, the experience of working against a remote, non-Windows operating system is very close to the speed of developing against a locally running .NET application, ensuring a seamless development process.

Mono Tools Pricing and Availability
Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 is currently available. Three product editions are available: Professional Edition (individual) for $99, Enterprise Edition (one developer in an organization) for $249, and Ultimate Edition for $2,499 which provides a limited commercial license to redistribute Mono on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and includes five enterprise developer licenses. All product versions include a one-year subscription for product updates.

To learn more about Mono Tools for Visual Studio visit http://mono-tools.com. To learn more about the Mono Project visit www.mono-project.com.

Novell and Mono are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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