Hurray! Finally the 2.8 version of Mono – the platform independent open source .NET framework is available as of today. I finally don’t have to recompile the trunk every now and then to get my bits running 
The Major Highlights according to the release notes are:
- C# 4.0
- Defaults to the 4.0 profile.
- New Garbage Collection engine
- New Frameworks:
- Parallel Framework
- System.XAML
- Threadpool exception behavior has changed to match .NET 2.0
- potentially a breaking change for a lot of Mono-only software
- See information below in the "Runtime" section.
- New Microsoft open sourced frameworks bundled:
- System.Dynamic
- Managed Extensibility Framework
- ASP.NET MVC 2
- System.Data.Services.Client (OData client framework)
- Performance
- Large performance improvements
- LLVM support has graduated to stable
- Use mono-llvm command to run your server loads with the LLVM backend
- Preview of the Generational Garbage Collector
- Version 2.0 of the embedding API
- WCF Routing
- .NET 4.0’s CodeContracts
- Removed the 1.1 profile and various deprecated libraries.
- OpenBSD support integrated
- ASP.NET 4.0
- Mono no longer depends on GLIB
Oh – they even linked my benchmark article.