Second Life just announced the beta testing of Mono in Second Life (see http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/29/mono-beta-launch/). It's a pretty limited beta so far ... only a few islands look like they will be Mono-enabled. Now, the blog entry mentioned something about LSL VM, which, from what I can tell, was an effort to Mono-enable SL sometime back in 2005. I can't seem to find much more about it than that. So, that said, there's some big questions. Will it support our favorite .Net languages? Sometime in the future, they say. Right now, it'll just be faster ... some 220x faster! On top of that, will we be able to use our favorite .Net editor? Dunno ... nothing is said about that. But I've mentioned what I think of the native LSL editor before so I'm hoping so. It'd be nice to see some Visual Studio project (vsi) templates for it -- or (even better) a fully integrated Visual Studio shell. From a technical standpoint, I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible though I imagine that (at least initially) the deployment story will leave some to be desired. (Lindens ... are you listening??) Will we be able to get to the core BCL? It is, after all, Mono, which supports the relevant ISO/ECMA standards (this includes an "Additional Generics Library" specification!!!!!). Unknown; they aren't commenting. The "FAQ" doesn't really address my Q's (and I'm gonna guess that these will be FAQ's for a bunch of other .Net developers).
I guess I'll just have to download the beta viewer and play with it. That just breaks my heart.
On other news, I'm working on my next security-related entry (Hashing) but things have been absolutely crazy-busy between work and my new "lady friend". But I promise to have it up before the weekend.