I wrote a wiki page yesterday about the current state of Mono integration in Wine and what I think needs to be done about it. That is at: http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono
Basically, if you install Mono in Wine, Wine will use it to run .NET programs. However, the combination doesn't work for any of the programs I've tried. There are a number of things wrong (listed on the wiki page), but none of them appear to affect a lot of programs.
My theory is that it just happens to not work very well because of random bugs. I think it's important that we improve this, so that we have an alternative to MS .NET. I am amazed that the licensing allows us to use MS .NET now (if indeed it really does), and I don't know how long that will continue.
So here is what I'd like to ask from the community:
* Try some .NET programs with Mono (use the mono26 verb in winetricks), and file Wine bugs when they don't work. Even if the bug is in Mono, we should investigate it and give them a nice report, since we are using Mono in a strange way. Use the dotnet keyword.
* If an installer for something other than .NET tries to install .NET, file a bug for that with the dotnet keyword.
* Someone other than me, please try to make a Windows build of Mono and run the Mono test suite under Wine. I want to make sure that the instructions make sense and that someone other than me can do this.