The idea of Microsoft releasing Visual Studio for Unix and Linux was once - quite literally - a joke. Not only was Visual Studio only built for Windows, but Microsoft's licensing had prevented people using its premier development environment with non-Windows platforms. Now, there's a little less to laugh about. Microsoft partner Novell has delivered a plug-in designed to help Visual Studio developers easily build, debug, test, and port applications built using C# in Visual Studio 2005 to Linux, Unix, and OS X. The plug-in has Microsoft's full blessing.