I'm not quite sure why Mono is so important. Technically, it's an interesting accomplishment to be sure, but I don't see that it gives you anything you can't ge

I'm not quite sure why Mono is so important. Technically, it's an interesting accomplishment to be sure, but I don't see that it gives you anything you can't get elsewhere. Particularly on the web front, MS is certainly not leading edge anymore. On the desktop application front, this is certainly better than coding GTK apps in C, but other alternatives to that already existed (namely the Ruby and Python bindings for GTK). The bottom line is that while C# and the .NET framework are certainly better than MS's previous development offerings, it still offers very little of interest in my opinion. Ruby, Scala, Clojure, and Python have much more compelling features for most problems.