In early December 2008 Moonlight 1.0 beta was released by the Mono team, making it possible to run  basic Silverlight 1.0 applications from your Linux Firefox installation. If you are like me mostly working on a Linux workstation, then its likely that you have seen little so far of the Microsoft Silverlight platform. The best way to think of Silverlight 1.0 is as Flash, but then by Microsoft. Similar to Flash, Silverlight installs as a web browser plugin and provides animation, graphics and audio/video. The next generation (Silverlight 2.0) includes support for running C# managed code from the plugin which should make things quite interesting.

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Cool (Linux) applications have their own icon in the notification area. To add my own icon in the Gnome notification area using Mono only took a few lines of code. In the post below I show how you can add your icon and associate a tooltip and right click menu to it.

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Although Mono 2.0.1 has been out for some time now it will take another major upgrade for Ubuntu to actually include it. Currently Ubuntu includes Mono 1.2.6.

If you would like to work with the newer Mono version you need to compile it yourself for now. Thankfully this is easier than it sounds. The following will upgrade your Ubuntu installation but note: this does not cover MonoDevelop, which will stay at the old version.

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