I've just read this article by O'Reilly: Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development?
It's really interesting because it opens new possible and curious scenario... if you considering that Mono is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework under Linux Platform, that goal might sound particularly audacious to many Linux fans.
Mono seems to be really a good product and it's totally free... the first problem of Mono development was the little presence of Visual tools for development, but now interesting products like MonoDevelop are born (with feature like VS.NET such as Intellisense, debugger, Solution Explorer etc.).
If you think also that actual development of Visual interfaces under Linux is not so simple (you have to write all with C/C++) and with the introduction of Mono you could use Visual Tools and C#, you could clearly understand the power of this product.
I'm really interesting in Mono... I think that Mono, with its open source nature, could be the future under Linux development (not the first, but one of the best development platform). If Visual tools will be written and will remain totally free, it could be also a serios competitor with the Windows development.
DotGNU Portable.NET is an interesting project for building a suite of free software tools to build and execute .NET applications, including a C# compiler, assembler, disassembler, and runtime engine.
Today is released the 0.6.4 version of the project: this version has a better C compiler, a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements in System.Windows.Forms, a completely rewritten the System.Xml parser and many fix with the XML library.