Για όσους δεν το γνωρίζουν ήδη το Mono είναι μία υλοποίηση από τη Novell του περιβάλλοντος .NET που τρέχει σε Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Unix, BSD και Solaris. Περιλαμβάνει το μεταγλωττιστή, το runtime environment (CLR) και τις περισσότερες απο τις βιβλιοθήκες του .NET.
Στη νέα 2.0 έκδοση περιλαμβάνονται (copy-paste από τις release notes):
- ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.
- ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.
- Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
- System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.
- System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
- System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.
- System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.
- Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
- Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
- Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
- Mono's SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
- Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces
- Extensive support for databases: PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
- C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono.
- C# 3.0 compiler με πλήρη υποστήριξη LINQ
- Visual Basic 8 compiler
- IL assembler και disassembler καθώς και όλα τα εργαλεία που είναι απαραίτητα για την ανάπτυξη εφαρμογών και libraries