Argiris Kirtzidi (one of the developers behind Managed OGRE) modified Moonlight to run inside the Ogre3D engine. You can render Moonlight applications or XAML files inside Ogre3D.

Some details in no particular order:

-Moonlight uses cairo for the graphics. I developed a new backend for cairo that fully utilizes the GPU (through Ogre’s RenderSystem) for rendering. This is completely independent from Moonbeam and can be used standalone.

-Moonlight’s core is a native C++ engine and is not dependent in Mono. It is flexible enough to be scripted by anything, javascript, managed code, native code, etc. I’ve got it working on both Mono and the .NET framework and I plan on embedding and trying out Lua for more lightweight stuff.

-If you opt for using managed code, it should be possible, in theory, to utilize the silverlight controls, develop a silverlight widget using visual studio and have it run through moonbeam with full debugging support.

-Getting it to work on Windows was no small task as the moonlight team is completely focused on linux, and there doesn’t seem to be much consideration about cross-platform-ness. I think this is reasonable, though, since moonlight is a young project and their specific goal is to implement silverlight for *nix systems. The downside is that it reduces its flexibility, e.g. in order to inject keyboard/mouse events I will have to create and pass to it GDK events or make heavy patches to it.
Hopefully, there will be more push in the future to get the *nix dependencies abstracted away from the core moonlight engine.

• The Moonlight Calculator Example.
• Miguel’s post about this
• Original post about the technique from the author