Mono.Zeroconf 0.7.4 and cross platform glory

Published on Wednesday, January 23, 2008

I released Mono.Zeroconf 0.7.4 last night which is a minor bug fix release. Packages are available for openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, and Fedora. Sources and binaries are available for Linux, Windows and OS X.

What I have found interesting about Mono.Zeroconf is a growing adoption by the Windows crowd. I have been getting almost weekly emails from a new Windows developer using Mono.Zeroconf. A few bugs have been fixed in the process, though mostly in the Bonjour provider, which doesn't affect modern Linux distros (because they use the Avahi provider, of course).

Since there's been good feedback from the Windows world, I spent a little time making Mono.Zeroconf actually build on Windows in Visual Studio (yikes!). I am producing .zip files of the regular sources as well to make releases more accessible on Windows. Additionally, I generate a -binary.zip file which contains just pre-compiled assemblies.

The fun thing with all of this is validating how truly remarkable Mono is. I had never written any of Mono.Zeroconf specifically for Windows, never tested it on Windows, yet released the precompiled assemblies (built in Linux by Mono) for the hell of it. And without any changes, everything "just works" on Windows/.NET (and Mac OS X as well).

Leap
Andy made the leap to Linux.

So what's so important about this? These new Mono.Zeroconf users on Windows inherit the fact that Mono.Zeroconf is truly cross platform, which means their applications are immediately more portable to Linux and other platforms that Mono supports. By luring Windows developers with delicious, easy to use libraries that are already cross platform, we make it easier and more enticing for those developers to bring their awesome applications to Linux.

Awesome. Mono rocks.