Linden Labs also uses Mono in the development of their Second Life project to improve the stability and speed of scripts – particularly calculation-intensive ones. 

"Deploying Mono as the primary scripting engine on the Second Life Grid has had enormously positive effects for our Residents," said Jim Purbrick, technical director, Core Platform, Linden Lab, said in a statement. "In fact, some of the internal benchmarking we've done has shown that scripts running on Mono run up to 220 times faster. The speed and reliability that Mono provides opens up new possibilities for content creators and improves the experience of even casual users."

Another user, Unity Technologies, a 3-D game development tool provider, uses Mono for its game development system. 

"We chose Mono because of its performance and cross-language capability," said Joachim Ante, chief technology officer and co-founder at Unity Technologies, said in a statement. "Mono provides Unity's diverse developer community the ability to work in such languages as JavaScript, C# and Boo, resulting in a very short learning curve and immediate familiarity with scripting in Unity.  The latest version of Mono represents significant improvements in stability and performance and makes it even easier for us to develop feature-rich cross-platform applications than run on the Web, Windows, OS X, Nintendo Wii and soon the iPhone."

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) also weighed in with their support for Mono 2.0.

"With the inclusion of Microsoft .NET 2.0 desktop components in the Mono 2.0 release, we will now be able to deliver the same graphical administration experience across over 125 platforms," said Krishna Ganugapati, vice president of Engineering at Likewise Software.

And Steve Bjorg, CTO at MindTouch, in a statement, said, "MindTouch built their open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform, Deki, on the Mono framework. MindTouch Deki enables customers to 'webify' legacy applications, bridge multiple applications with a common interface and provide a more usable interface to systems and databases. Since the core of MindTouch Deki is implemented in C# and deployed to Linux using Mono, we are excited to see Mono 2.0 adding C# 3.0 compiler support, including support for Language Integrated Query (LINQ)."

De Icaza said Mono 2.0 is available now and can be downloaded at www.mono-project.com/downloads. More information on the Mono project can be found at www.mono-project.com.