Beta Release soon ..

Setelah rapat internal bersama Development Team RIKA tadi siang sekitar jam 13:30 sampai jam 16:00, kita bakal mengeluarkan RIKA dalam 2 versi untuk 2 platform sekaligus. Versi pertama diharapkan sudah bisa dilaunch pada Q1 2006. Kami juga akan melaunch RIKA versi beta dalam waktu dekat, dan kami mengharapkan partisipasi dan saran dari beberapa komunitas, para akademisi, dan praktisi IT.
[taken from joelonsoftware]
I've been messing around with Mono off and on in my spare time for the last year and a half, mostly on my Powerbook but also on Linux and Windows a bit too. I've created some simple cross platform ASP.NET websites, and small cross platform 'utility' desktop apps with it.

As others have mentioned, Mono is a much more usable development platform on Linux than OSX or Windows at this point. Monodevelop is close to impossible to get working on the Mac, and once you do get it working it's slow and crashes every time you look at it wrong. There are X-Code project templates and syntax definitions available, but it's nothing like using a dedicated .NET IDE. Realistically, you're going to be using a simple text editor with c# syntax highlighting, makefiles, and online documentation on the Mac, not an IDE. On Windows, I'd just spring for Visual Studio, honestly. On Linux, MonoDevelop is probably just starting to come into it's own.

One possibility, that I just remembered, though was XDevelop (http://www.omnicore.com/xdevelop.htm). It's about as close to a mature cross-platform Mono IDE as you're going to get right now. The downside is that it's non-free, still pretty new, and doesn't do ASP.NET.

Practically speaking, Mono is not really cross platform in the Java sense. You CAN create a simple command line app that will run on Windows, Mac or Linux without recompiling. GUI apps, on the other hand are a bit more tricky due to the lack of decent cross platform GUI toolkits.

There ARE a few different options available, none of which are all that mature. Windows Forms under Mono is extremely immature, so that's pretty much out for production apps right now. GTK# is fairly mature and fairly well documented on Linux, and IIRC Windows too, but isn't really ready for primetime on the Mac. Cocoa# works pretty well for creating Mac native interfaces using Interface Builder and NIB files, but it's not very well tested yet, and suffers from lack of documentation (being at .2 it's probably also likely to incur breaking changes in the future). The wx.NET port of wxWidgets is closer to prime time than the others for targeting all 3 platforms, but it's a lowest common denominator kind of thing where you can't really target the nuances of each platform the way you might want.

I believe the current goal (cross platform wise) in the Mono community is to create multi tiered apps with the back end in pure managed code, and use Windows Forms (Windows), GTK# (Linux), and Cocoa# (Mac) for a native front end on each platform. With Cocoa# only being at .2 and not really established, I think that approach is only practical for a Windows/Linux kind of cross platform solution though.

As far as ASP.NET applications go, things are a bit better using Mono and XSP, but then again cross platform isn't really as big a deal with Web Applications. Is it? Anyway, there still isn't a good cross platform ASP.NET IDE.

So I guess my answer to the question "Mono - is it really ready for primetime?" would be yes, but only if you're developing on a Linux box, or don't mind doing things the hard way.

-=Aaron=-