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The Novell Mono project, which puts Microsoft .Net development technologies on non-Windows platforms, is stepping up its mobile efforts, and has its eye on the iPhone and Android.

It will preview MonoDroid in August, and at the same time, will show off a version of Microsoft's rich web toolkit, Silverlight, for the iPhone. The Mono-based Moonlight project previously put Silverlight on Linux, Mac and Unix.

Another upcoming release from the open source Novell unit is Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0, which integrates with Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE to enable development of Mono-based applications. This will also support Android and iPhone in future. And the head of the project, Miguel de Icaza, indicates that Mono will soon add support for the Nokia-Intel mobile Linux platform, MeeGo. This is not surprising, given that the first open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux was created for Moblin, the Intel half of the MeeGo technology.

Unlike some attempts to split Microsoft tools from Windows, Mono has the support of the Redmond giant. When the Moblin version of Silverlight was mooted, it commented: "We see this is a clear extension of our current efforts with Novell where we are building an open source implementation of Silverlight called Moonlight that is targeted at the broad range of Linux."

This was mainly a PC oriented move, but Novell pushed Mono into the mobile world last year, when it unveiled its first Apple targeted product, MonoTouch, its first app for creating .Net programs for the iPhone. (Microsoft has also worked directly with Nokia to put Silverlight on Symbian).

Ethan Nagel of developer firm Nagel Technologies told Techworld at Microsoft's MIX conference this week: "Mono's amazing. It's a surprisingly flexible environment. It's quicker than rewriting your code every time, and you're not making any compromises."

Novell also demonstrated Xbox 360 games being translated into iPhone apps, and when it does the same for Android, it could take Xbox apps into the mobile mass market. At MIX, Novell showed an iPhone running an open source derivative of an Indiana Jones game for Xbox and Windows Phone, which was created using Microsoft's XNA framework, based on .Net.

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