So, made quite an ironic discovery, the mono team, responsible for making the .NET framework available on most devices and for bringing out its potential with things like Mono.Simd (hardware accelerated vector math) and Monogame, an open source port of the now abandoned XNA Framework has recently announced that they will also be bringing the framework to the PlayStation 4, the ironic part is that the .NET Framework is the most requested feature for the Xbox One and there are no details about whether it will be ported and considering that the .NET Framework is Microsoft’s baby and PlayStation is their direct competitor, it’s just sad (for Microsoft)

So far, this is only for PS4 developers so unlike PSM, the PS4 port will have access to the full power of the platform.

Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework which unleashes the full potential of the VM based language design. Simply speaking, something made in a .NET language that doesn’t rely on platform dependent code can be run on any platform that the Mono/.NET framework works on.

In its early days Mono was quite behind .NET in almost everything, the .NET framework was much faster and had many more features than Mono, however recently Mono started catching up and .NET eventually fell behind. Today Mono is much more useful than .NET; the framework currently supports about 14 platforms compared to the 4-5 by .NET.

The platforms supported by Mono are

Windows

Linux

Mac OSX

Sun Solaris

BSD

Nintendo Wii

Nintendo Wii U

PlayStation 3

PlayStation Vita

PlayStation 4

Android

iOS

Windows 8

Windows Phone 8

OUYA (android)

whereas the platforms supported by .NET are

Windows

Windows CE devices (like Windows Phone)

.NET Micro for severely restricted devices

Windows 8

Xbox 360 (abandoned)

Note that .NET is limited to Microsoft devices.

The fact that Mono is being ported to PS4 should hopefully better the platforms reputation for game development as the common belief is that you can only make a good game in native C/C++ (with which I completely disagree).

So, what do you guys think? Has Microsoft completely abandoned .NET? Will they bring it to the Xbox One? Do you think this Mono port will increase the number of developers (especially indies) interested in the platform?