Mono Live has launched, the brainchild of Joseph Hill. They are offering a Live CD of Mono for folks to try out the Mono development platform. It includes Mono, various Mono-based applications and .NET applications that you can take for a spin:

• Development tools: Mono, MonoDoc, MonoDevelop.
• Web portals: ASP.NET Forums, mojoPortal, IBuySpy.
• Desktop Applications: Beagle, F-Spot, Tomboy, Muine

Mainsoft releases Grasshopper

Mainsoft unveiled today Grasshopper, a technology to run your .NET applications on a Java Virtual Machine. Mainsoft's Grasshopper and Mono share the same class library to deliver the functionality, check out Mainsoft's developer site.

They have various tutorials like "Create your first Linux application with the Visual Studio .NET IDE in 10 minutes."

We have new installers in our Downloads page for Windows, Linux (all distributions, Debian included) and SLES running on the S390 architecture.

A couple of new tutorials: Using GConf in your Mono application and Using Notification Icons with Gtk# from Milen Dzhumerov.

Fresh OSX package for Mono 1.1.7 is now available from the downloads page

RemObjects announced its Chrome compiler, an object-oriented Pascal compiler for .NET and Mono. It consumes Gtk# out of the box.

Omnicore announced X-Develop, its cross platform Mono, .NET and Java IDE. It supports Windows, Linux and MacOS X. They offer a 30 day trial of their product. They have a showcase of features on their main page.

Mono 1.1.7 has been released, the major highlights of this release are:

• Revamped IO layer and http stack, this will give up to three times performance boost on networking applications.
• Significant Windows.Forms progress, lots of new widgets and improved widgets.
• 2.0 progress: compiler bug fixes, eight new ASP.NET 2.x controls (including databound widgets).
• New working assemblies: Configuration.Install and ServiceProcess.
• Upgrades to JScript and VB Alpha compilers.

For a detailed list, see the Mono 1.1.7 release notes.