Lluis just announced Mono.Addins:

Mono.Addins is a framework for creating extensible applications, and for creating libraries which extend those applications.

Mono.Addins has been designed to be easy to use and useful for a wide range of applications: from simple applications with small extensibility needs, to complex applications which need support for large add-in structures.

This new framework intends to set an standard for building extensible applications and add-ins in Mono.

The main features of Mono.Addins are:

• Supports descriptions of add-ins using custom attributes (for simple and common extensions) or using an xml manifest (for more complex extensibility needs).
• Support for add-in hierarchies, where add-ins may depend on other add-ins.
• Lazy loading of add-ins.
• Provides an API for accessing to add-in descriptions, which will allow building development and documentation tools for handling add-ins.
• Dynamic activation / deactivation of add-ins at run time.
• Allows sharing add-in registries between applications, and defining arbitrary add-in locations.
• Allows implementing extensible libraries.
• In addition to the basic add-in engine, it provides a Setup library to be used by applications which want to offer basic add-in management features to users, such as enabling/disabling add-ins, or installing add-ins from on-line repositories.

If you are interested in knowing more about Mono.Addins, this document explains the library basics and some examples see our Introduction to Mono Addins document.

And in-depth explanation is in the Mono.Addins Reference Manual

This is currently available from: here.

The Race to Linux will start today at 5pm, if you have not registered yet, you can still do so.

See the Race to Linux page for more details.

Google has extended the deadline for entering proposals to include this weekend.

We have done a special release of Mono based on our HEAD release for the Race to Linux contest.

Source code, packages, updated VMware image and Mono installer are all available from the Race to Linux Downloads page.

The Google Summer of Code has started. Students interested in participating in the Summer of Code need to submit their applications in the next ten days.

Some ideas of interesting things that can be done with Mono are available in our Student Projects page.

If you think that you have a good idea for a project to be implemented for Mono, but is not listed on that page, feel free to submit your idea.

We are looking at improving Mono's OSX support (Winforms, debugger support, improving Cocoa#); new ports and improving existing Mono ports; Profiling; low-level optimizations; New Windows.Forms widgets; Work on 3.0 components and libraries; Improving MonoDevelop and creating new C# class libraries for Mono.

Important: Time is short, only ten days left for applying to the Summer of Code.

Mono packages for the Nokia 770 and Nokia 800 are now available from our Maemo page.

We are providing a single-click install for users of Maemo. The package split will allow developers to only install the components that they need to run their software.

New updates to Mono will be automatically available on your Nokia device as well.

For example, by installing the sample editor application, you will pull Mono and Gtk#, otherwise only the core Mono runtime will be installed.

MonoDevelop 0.13 has been released.

See the release notes for full details and screenshots.

This version features:

• Version Control support (Subversion only currently), supports adding, removing, moving, check-out, check-in, ChangeLogs and patch review.
• Much improved Code Completion, Visual Studio like templates.
• Task View.
• Support for Web References (Generate stubds from WSDL contracts from the IDE).

Gtk# Designer improvements:

• Use of partial classes to separate user code from generated code, this means that it is no longer necessary to "Bind" manually every widget (this is optional, specially since not every language supports partial classes).
• Undo/Redo are now available.
• Internationalization support via Gettext.
• Absolute widget positioning is now possible with the Gtk.Fixed support (for those uncomfortable with the use of tables for GUI design).

Compilation Features:

• Native support for Visual Studio 2005 solutions.
• Custom commands for compilation.
• Makefile integration (delegating operations to external makefiles, keep MonoDevelop in sync with Makefile sources, resources, dependencies).
• Generic Prototype support: for adding support for other programming languages (compiling C libraries or compiling translations).

Other features:

• Pressing F1 will load an external Monodoc for the current member highlighted.
• Nunit 2.2.9 is now distributed with MonoDevelop (and integrated with it).
• 71 reported bugs fixed.
• New deployment options allow external commands (build RPMs and DEBs for example).