Experienecs with Mono
I've been playing around with Mono a little bit on Redhat Linux. I wanted to see how truly "compatible" it was with stuff that I have written on the windows platform. I also have a good business reason- one of the groups my team supports uses Linux for data processing activities. My team has already written some great utilities to do this on the windows form and we wanted to see how adaptable these would be for Linux in a shell environment.
Anyway, installing Mono on Redhat enterprise took all of 5 minutes. We have a pretty sharp system admin here, and he took care of that. He said the toughest part was figuring out what order to install the rpm's (redhat packages) in.
After installing Mono, I took a bunch of class libraries (DLL's) assemblys from a rather large windows forms application. Since I would be playing around on the command line, I created a console application in .NET and called a few of the library functions. These library functions use a lot of native XML objects including XmlDocument, XmlTextReader, XmlTextWriter.
I FTP'd the dll's over and ftp'd over the console application EXE. I then ran the "mono MyExe.exe" and I was pleasantly surprised by the result. There were a few minor issues due to the way some file paths were coded (using \ instead of /) but those were trivial to get around. The entire application worked after some very minor tweaking!
Anyway, I guess the point is- if you have a linux platform, you can easily run 1.1 assemblies on it. The only thing you really need to be aware of (at least in my experience so far) is differences in environmental things- such as the way linux handles paths. There is probably an easy way to deal with this, such as making your application smarter based on what OS it is running on.