Project Mono... VB.NET commitment! Finally!

Novell and Miguel de Icaza have posted the Mono Project Roadmap outlining the release schedule of upcoming versions of Mono.  What’s interesting to me is the section under Mono 1.2 that states:

New compilers: VB.NET and JScript support.

What’s important here is that earlier in the document, it states that “Our strategy is to release the mature components as Mono 1.0, and have upcoming versions of Mono add extra functionality.” So it looks like Mono will have pretty complete support for VB.NET sometime toward the end of 2004.

It’s nice to see this road map finally outlined, as it details what, and more importantly, what will not be part of the officially supported releases of Mono during the next several years.  Another interesting piece of information is the following:

A missing component of Mono is the Code Access Security (CAS). This functionality is not needed in today’s Mono as currently Mono is being used to run fully trusted applications, and we are not using it on embedded scenarios where assemblies would have different trust levels.

Hmmm… fully trusted applications.  Very interesting that they are not putting more resources in this area as it is probably going to be one of the key elements to applications in the near future.  It’s missing features like this that will keep Microsoft’s implementation one step ahead of the game ;-)  Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Mono is an excellent project that will add an immense value to the overall strategy of .NET; especially with the ability to run VB.NET applications at some point in the not so distant future on Linux and Unix based machines including PPC processors.