Novell has announced the availability of Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 to facilitate the development of .NET applications for Linux, UNIX and Mac OS X within Microsoft Visual Studio.

The add-in module for Microsoft's Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), Mono Tools for Visual Studio allows Microsoft .NET developers to utilize familiar Visual Studio environments to design, code and maintain multi-platform applications.

"With this next generation of Mono Tools for Visual Studio, Novell continues to offer customers, partners and developers the best experience in Visual Studio for targeting Linux, one of the world's leading deployment platforms," said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Developer Platform vice president at Novell. "Having the ability to work within a familiar operating system, leveraging existing skill-sets and tools, enables our customers and partners to streamline the development process to take applications to new markets in a more timely, cost effective manner."

Mono has been severely criticized by the Free Software community and often dubbed at Microsoft's trojan horse which Novell is planting in free software systems.

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