After striking out on its own the former Mono team, now reconstituted as Xamarin, has just issued its first release of Mono. The key features of Mono 2.10.3 are:

• MacOS X Lion is supported: both the Mono runtime and Gtk+ as shipped with Mono have been updated to run properly on Lion. This solves the known problems that users had running MonoDevelop on MacOS X.
• Vastly improved WCF stack
• Many bug fixes to our precise garbage collector.

This is essentially a minor release with lots of bug fixes but you can treat it as proof of life for the Mono project after being dropped by Attachmate. The release also serves as the foundation for the soon-to-be-released updates to Xamarin's commerical products MonoTouch 4.1 (for iOS) and Mono for Android 1.03.

There is also news of C# 5.0 in a blog post by Miguel de Icaza.

The asynchronous language support. i.e. await, isn't fully complete and the final release awaits this event... Also the compiler has two backend code generation modules a standard System.Reflection.Emit backend and one based on IKVM.Reflection. The IKVM backend is claimed to be a better code generator that Microsoft original which is gives you some idea of the Mono projects confidence in building its own .NET infrastructure. You can download and try out the version 5.0 compiler from github.

More Information

Mono's Download Site

Miguel de Icaza's blog

Xamarin website

Related news:

Attachmate does the right thing for Mono

Mono in trouble?

Mono for Android V1.0 now shipping

Mono 2.10 released with reservations

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