After years of pointing out the Mono project as a beacon of hope to those who want to enjoy the benefits of ASP.NET without suffering Microsoft lock-in, I had honestly given up hope of ever seeing this open source effort bear practical fruit. Imagine my surprise last week when Beta 1 of the Mono Project was released!

Downloads are available for Windows and Mac OS X, as well as all popular Linux platforms.

For those who don't know, Mono is an open source project that aims to create cross-platform versions of:

• a C# compiler
• the Common Language Runtime (CLR)
• most of the .NET Framework's class library, including ADO.NET and ASP.NET

Most notably for Web developers, ASP.NET (including both Web Forms and Web Services) is advertised as being fully functional with this release!

The Mono project, which is sponsored by Novell (who bought out Ximian last year), have two more beta releases planned before the final release of Mono 1.0 on or about June 30, 2004