Miguel briefed NewsForge.com on the new roadmap yesterday evening. Among other things, he told us “We’ve been working on this thing for a long time and we needed a number of things. First, Mono is close to completion at this point: very, very close to completion. There is, of course, a desire from hackers to run away and start implementing features from the .Net 1.2 framework.”
de Icaza went on to say “The new roadmap serves two purposes. One, for the mono community to know where we should focus and why we should focus first on implementing what is out there and available today. So it’s a roadmap for developers – our own internal developers – to know where we are going. And also it’s a way for corporations and for people who are interested in deploying Mono-based applications to know what we’re releasing and when we’re releasing it.”
Miguel said there is a lot of confusion about when certain parts of the project will be ready. “For example,” he said: “Are you going to have Windows forms in production state by March?” Providing his own answer to the question, he said “No, we’re not going to have windows forms in production state in that time frame. But we’ll give you web services, we’ll give you web forms, we’ll give GTK#, we’ll give you a solid run-time, and a C# compiler.”
The new roadmap calls for Mono 1.0 to be completed in Q2 of 2004, and Mono 1.2 to follow by the end of the year. Mono 1.4 is scheduled for the middle of 2005 and Mono 2.0 early in 2006.
