I am working on the first version of a Mono win32 combined installer that for the first time in many months and much iteration will actually use a different GLib. We will based this one on glib-2.6.4. Zoltan Varga had done this recommendation quite a few weeks a go but since the Mono installers I do for Windows is coupled with GTK+ and Gtk# I had hold off on doing the change.

The Mono combined installer is the bases for my build system. As you may recall, I build all of the pieces (Mono, Gtk#, XSP, Gecko#, etc) using a combination of Cygwin and the Mono combined installer located in C:/mono/Mono-1.1.6 mapped to /usr/local. I do not use MS Framework 1.1 SDK unless I need to validate something, but what is shipped is finally built with Mono.

Another big release in terms of significance will be new Gtk# SDK and Runtime installers for .NET Framework runtime and SDK respectively. These will be very important since Mike Kestner, Ben Mauer, Todd Berman, Miguel de Icaza and many others have been working hard to fix errors and to improve the functionality of Mono and Gtk# in Win32! I will admit that there have been times when I felt that Mono on Win32 did not get enough love, but here it is to prove me wrong. -- /me likes being proved wrong :-D

As it turns out Gtk# Win32 Installer for Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SDK is one of the most downloaded projects at Novell Forge. Last week it was #1 and with over 4,700 downloads. The Mono combined installer for Win32 is probably just as popular but once it becomes available in http://www.mono-project.com/downloads I loose the ability to keep an aggregate count of all of its downloads.