Mono
any (slight) pain to monkeys is inflicted under home office license

a Free (X11) re-impl. of parts of '.Net(tm)'
investment protection
a better development environment
a more powerful model

Definately in Gnome 14.7.3.2ac6
go to Miguel's talk
interesting background
replacing the duff windows APIs
multi-language, the many true ways
very rapid development & runtime
bootstraps on Linux
http://www.go-mono.com

Amazing progress
Gtk#, ASP.Net, ADO.Net, Qt, MonoLogo