Beyond cross platform support, one of the things that sets Mono apart is the fact it has a linker. You can link in the portions of the runtime your application needs into the application itself so that your users are not required to download the framework.
Mono inlcudes:
- An IDE
- A cross platform ECMA CLI runtime engine.
- A cross platform IKVM Java runtime engine.
- C# 1.0 compiler.
- Development toolchain.
- Class libraries implementing the .NET 1.1 profile.
- The Gtk# 1.0 GUI programming toolkit.
- Mono specific libraries.
- Third party convenience libraries bundled with the release.
- GNU Classpath for the CLI.
- Visual Basic runtime.
There is support for both ADO.NET and ASP.NET. The major unfinished part is WinForms support.
Only time will tell if Microsoft will attack, embrace or tolerate this. I read an interview once with one of the people involved in Mono. It may have been Miguel de Icaza himself. Anyway, the interviewer asked him about the possibility of a lawsuit from Microsoft. He responded that they actually had two forks of the source code. One that was resistant to Microsoft patent infringements, the other that was not. I would assume there are advantages to the infringing fork.
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