Rob Howard today announced that their Graffiti product will run on top of Mono, and the platforms supported by Mono:

Early this week we announced that VistaDB will be the database that Graffiti uses by default. You will be able to use other databases (SQL Server and MySQL) too, but we liked VistaDB for a variety of reasons. One of which we're officially announcing today:

Graffiti is going to run on Mono.

There are a variety of reasons why adding Mono support makes sense. But the biggest reason is choice. It gives people more choices for how they want to use Graffiti.

By supporting Mono, in addition to Microsoft .NET, Graffiti will be available on the following platforms:

Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Unix

We're not there yet, but we've been working with some folks on the Mono team to make the necessary changes in Graffiti to run on Mono. Everyday we get a little closer, but we're far enough along now that we're ready to start talking about it.

Of course, having someone like Telligent making this announcement has made all of us very happy. We look forward to their product launch.

Here is an intro about what Graffiti is.

We have released the new version of MoMA which corresponds with the 1.2.6 release of Mono. There are two very important changes that are worth mentioning about this new version.

- Addition of .Net 3.0/3.5 Classes - Beginning with 1.2.6, we include the definitions needed to scan your .Net 3.0 and 3.5 apps. At this point, we report everything as missing. Even though we have implemented some of these classes in our Olive project, we do not currently ship this with the released Mono, and MoMA tracks the Mono releases.

So what good is adding the 3.0/3.5 stuffs if we are going to report it all as missing? We will soon be getting to the point where we need to figure out what new stuff to implement next. By scanning your app with MoMA and submitting the missing report, we can see which parts are the most important to our users so we can prioritize. (And yes, we _really_ use this data. MoMA reports have pretty much dictated our prioritization since it was released a year ago.)

- Removal of Design Namespaces - One of our awesome mono-vangelists pointed out that people scan their app (and third party controls) and see all kinds of warnings about things missing in the Design classes. However, these classes are not used to run apps, just for designers such as Visual Studio. So we are potentially scaring off users for no reason. Therefore, beginning with 1.2.6, we no longer include the Design namespaces in MoMA reports. (If you really want the Design stuffs, you can download the definition file that includes them on the MoMA home page.)

- How Do I Get These New Features? - The new class definitions could not be handled by existing version of MoMA, so you will need to download a new version of MoMA, which is available on the MoMA homepage: http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA.

We have just released Mono 1.2.6. Some of the highlights for this release include:

• Native Windows.Forms driver for MacOS X allows Winforms-based applications to run without an X server.
• Support for the ASP.NET AJAX APIs and controls.
• Support for FastCGI deployments: ASP.NET can now be deployed on a multitude of servers that implement the FastCGI protocol (lighttpd for example) in addition to Apache.
• Windows.Forms now supports the WebControl on Windows and Linux using Mozilla.
• Runtime will now consume much less memory for 2.0-based applications due to various optimizations in generics support as well as including many new performance improvements and an updated verifier and an implementation of CoreCLR security.
• C# compiler is quickly approaching full 3.0 support, most of the basics work right now (except support for System.Query.Expression AST generation).
• Mono 1.2.6 can now be used as an SDK for creating Silverlight 1.1 applications on all platforms. This allows developers to create applications that target Silverlight without requiring a Windows installation.

Full details are available on the release notes. To get a copy, visit the downloads section on the web site.

Gert Driesen has announced a major upgrade to NAnt. This release includes many new improvements and you can download source and binaries from here.

The Mono Project is participating in Google's Highly Open Participation (GHOP) Contest. If you're a pre-university student over the age of 13, check out our task list and claim a task. If you successfully complete it you'll win a t-shirt and a certificate, and for every three tasks you complete you'll win $100, up to a maximum of $500. The most successful students will win a trip to Google's Headquarters in Mountain View, CA!

This is a fantastic opportunity to join an open source community, help people, and get rewarded for it. It's not limited to coding; you can write documentation, translate an application, or even create icons. Applications built with Mono such as Banshee and F-Spot are taking part too.

If you have any questions, hop onto IRC or email our mailing lists and we'll do our best to help you. All community members are welcome to help out guiding students and suggesting new tasks.