This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Sean McCormack. Original Post: Monoppix 1.0.8 Released - Run VS.NET compiled apps on Linux w/ no recompile! Feed Title: Vini Vidi Vici - Sean McCormack's Blog Feed URL: http://smccormack.blogs.com/adapdev/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss Feed Description: Sean McCormack's Blog, focusing on various aspects of .NET development, open source projects, recommended books and tools Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Sean McCormack Latest Posts From Vini Vidi Vici - Sean McCormack's Blog

This is pretty freakin cool.  I've talked about Monoppix before, which is a port of Knoppix.  It's a Linux distro that can be run from a CD and contains the latest Mono framework and tools.

What's REALLY cool though is you can take an c# windows app that you've built on a windows box, put the binary on the Monoppix machine and run it natively without any recompile.  Wow. Jon makes a good point on why this is possible:

I think there is a widespread misconception that Mono can only compile .NET source. It can, but it can also execute .NET compiled code (MSIL). That means you can compile an application on Windows under Visual Studio, copy the EXE onto a Linux box with Mono installed, and run it under Mono. There are of course other requirements, like you can't be making Windows native PInvoke calls, Mono needs to have implemented all features you're using, etc., but there's no need to compile under Mono to run on Mono.