The open source Mono project that makes Microsoft's .NET development framework cross-platform - and is meant to entice Windows developers to Linux by making things seem warmly familiar - is now loosely compatible with .NET Framework 3.5.

It lacks Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation and Communication Foundation.

From Microsoft's pragmatic point-of-view, Mono gets .NET widgetry to places that it would otherwise be barred from.

New features include a one-click install for Windows, Mac OS X, SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE (well, Novell does sponsor Mono); support for most of the hardware platforms currently on the market and reportedly all the Microsoft .NET 2.0 APIs, including ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms.

There is also an improved C# 3.0 compiler with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) as well as the usual performance upgrades and a virtual machine image that comes with a ready-to-use development environment and open source web and desktop .NET applications such as ASP.NET Starter Kits.

Then too there's a Mono Migration Analyzer tool (MoMA) for .NET-to-Linux migrations that runs natively on .NET or Mono and quantifies the number of changes required to run a .NET application on Linux.

Reportedly an analysis of 4,600 .NET applications using MoMA found that 45% of the applications required no code changes to work with Mono. Another 24% required fewer than six code changes to run on Mono.

Reportedly desktop apps are harder to convert than server apps and a certain percentage of apps simply have to be rewritten.

According to IDC, nearly 50% of IT decision makers, developers and architects surveyed use .NET as the application technology platform on which their mission-critical applications (other than e-mail) run.

Mono was used to develop Moonlight, the open source plug-in version of Microsoft's Silverlight for creating and hosting next-generation rich interactive applications.

See http://www.mono-project.com/downloads.