Conrad right. It is more accurate to state, that Microsoft's implementation of the .Net framework is limited to Windows. Microsoft has openly published the standards it used to build the .Net framework via Ecma International under which is Javascript and other technologies are approved as an open standards. C# is also an open (Ecma) standard. This could be why the Mono Project built a C# compiler and ignored VB.Net.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/clr/thread/feb5160b-cf5d-4b4b-b3d3-6da8ce21e7c1

The .NET technology (or rather the standards it is based on) are inherently cross platform capable.

Unfortunately Microsoft's implementation only works on Windows (98 and newer) depending on the version (and works on x86, x86_64/AMD64, and IA64). Trimmed down versions also work on the XBox 360 in the form of XNA (PowerPC) and on Windows CE in the form of .NET CE (on ARM and MIPS). There is also a limited shared source implementation, (formerly "Rotor"), which runs on BSD and Mac but you can only use it for educational use.

Thankfully Microsoft published what makes the .NET technology possible as open standards, and the the Mono Project is a reimplementation of those standards and is about 98% compatible with Microsoft's .NET 1.1 and about 80% compatible Microsoft's .NET 2.0 class libraries as of the latest release and is fully bytecode/binary compatible. Mono's implementation runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OSX, HP-UX, AIX, and tons of others and is easy fairly easy to port. It runs on x86, x86_64/AMD64, IA64, Sparc, Sparc64, PowerPC, MIPS, ARM, S/370, etc. It can run on pretty much anything with a C compiler, MMU support, and Posix interfaces to the OS.

Hope that helps!


Zac Bowling
http://zbowling.com/
http://mono-project.com/