I stuck around LinuxWorld until Miguel de Icaza issued his State of the Mono Address. I’ve been following the Mono project for some time via the website, but this was much better.
C# is done, VB is 70% done, and JavaScript is 50% done. This is good. Miguel demonstrated an almost unmodified version of iBuySpy that was only really slow because it was connecting to an MSSQL server in Spain over 802.11b.
In theory, you could write an ASP.NET web application today and deploy it on a Linux server using Mono. You can reuse the docs that are available for C# and .NET (from Microsoft), and you can also reuse the docs and resources available from MS and third parties.
Miguel stressed that we should reuse the Microsoft booth (next to the Mono booth) to learn about all of the cool ASP stuff that you can do.
The Mono team is also working on a new version fo their JIT compiler which will speed up apps significantly. He also demoed a sweet debugger written in GTK# (GTK bindings for C#) and a digital camera organization app that he wrote for himself (not for you). It was running slow over a wireless connection, so he brought out the laptop to reassure us that the app was fast and non-blocking.
It is obvious that WinForms is one of the least mature parts of Mono. More people are interested in using Mono for hosting ASP apps, so that stuff is getting done quicker. He stressed several times that if we wrote some regression tests, patched some code, did some documentation, that Mono would be complete in a matter of weeks.
There is database support for pretty much every popular database that runs under Linux. You can take an exe produced from Visual Studio or the mono compiler and run it using mono.
Overall I was impressed by the state of Mono and the demos. It’s awsome to be able to take a Microsoft demo app out of the box and run it using Mono. There were only a few configuration changes that had to be made to take case specific files into consideration. Other than that, it just worked: mono server.exe 8080.