Novell has unveiled a new offering to facilitate the development of .Net applications for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X within Microsoft Visual Studio.
Novell said that the new add-in module for Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), Mono Tools for Visual Studio will allow Microsoft .Net developers to utilise their familiar Visual Studio environment to design, code and maintain multi-platform applications.
The company said that Mono Tools enables corporate developers, independent software vendors and development services providers to expand market opportunities and deployment options. It also enables C# and .Net developers to stay within their preferred IDE, and use their existing .NET ecosystem of code, libraries and tools to develop or port applications to Linux, Unixor Mac OS X.
With Mono Tools, developers can build multi-platform applications and identify related issues, isolating and fixing them directly within Visual Studio, the company said.
According to Novell, Mono Tools for Visual Studio enables developers to leverage the multi-platform coding, testing and debugging functionality of the Mono platform, all while staying within Visual Studio. The new tools helps to create virtual appliances and software appliances for .Net applications using integrated appliance building functionality.
In addition, the new Mono Tools delivers out-of-the-box integration with SUSE Studio Online, a hosted tool that enables users to build and test appliances based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or openSUSE.
Miguel de Icaza, founder and vice president at Novell, said: With Mono Tools for Visual Studio, we are bridging the gap between Visual Studio, one of the world’s leading development platforms, and Linux, one of the world’s leading deployment platforms. Customers have been asking us for an easier, more simple and streamlined process to port their .NET applications to Linux, UNIX and Mac.
Mono Tools for Visual Studio is available in three editions including, professional edition (individual) for $99, enterprise edition for $249, and ultimate edition for $2,499.
