Mono?
Why the heck would you need a separate "back end" to Visual Studio to target Mono? Isn't the main goal of Mono to allow you to run .NET applications unmodified on a non-Windows platform?
Microsoft partners are now free to extend Visual Studio to target non-Microsoft platforms according to Microsoft's developer division corporate vice president S. Somasegar. "We never had any licence restriction on the product itself," he told El Reg. "Individual developers have done whatever they wanted to do. We had a …