14 DAY TRIAL // Mono, a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix and other operating systems, has reached version 3.6.
The developers are saying that "Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. A growing family of solutions and an active and enthusiastic contributing community are helping position Mono to become the leading choice for development of cross platform applications."
The Mono platform is in fact used in numerous applications all over the world, although the most visible are probably the GUI toolkits. This is a very versatile piece of technology, and it's compatible with most of the major platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, iPhone OS, Sun Solaris, BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD), Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Wii, and Sony PlayStation 3.
In fact, you are probably using Mono right now and you don't even know it. If you have Banshee, F-Spot, GNOME Do, OpenVPN-Admin, Pinta, or Tomboy installed, you are already using the Mono packages. This is just a small sample as there are hundreds of other applications available.
According to the changelog, a few runtime performance counters have been integrated into the profiler, allowing the performance counter information to be surfaced to profiling tools and in particular Xamarin's upcoming profiler; the profiler now produces backtraces for statistical mode; the profiler's tracing mode now works on ARM; the debugger now supports line and column ranges; the debugger now provides support for changing the current line in the top frame; a number bugfixes and performance improvements for the debugger have been implemented; and the debugger now support reading simple properties without calling their getter.
Also, a buffered response mode has been added to improve the network efficiency on high-latency links such as USB; the GC bridge has gotten a lot of performance work; System.IO.Compression has been implemented; a more comprehensive test harness has been implemented; fine grained locking is now used instead of a big hot lock; the profiler is now able to produces backtraces in statistical mode; periodical flushing should now help users a little more; the handling of the volatile. CIL prefix has been fixed; the IKVM's ikdasm tool has been added; and the C# Compiler has received quite a few improvements and fixes.
A comprehensive list of changes can be found in the official announcement. You can download download Mono 3.6 right now from Softpedia.