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The voice of the Mono Community.
Table of contents
- 1. Headlines
- 1.1 Mono 0.19 released
- 1.2 Gtk# 0.7 released
- 1.3 Mono 0.18 released
- 1.4 DB2 System.Data client contributed
- 1.5 MacOS X support on the runtime
- 1.6 IKVM (a Java VM for .NET) runs with Mono
- 1.7 Gsirc is making great process
- 1.8 Mono Debugger released!
- 2. Meet the team. This week Atsushi Enomoto
- 3. CVS Activity
- 4. Mailing List Activity
1.1 Mono 0.19 released
Yes!, this week we are having two Mono releases. The main reasons for
it is the 0.19 release were a lot of improvement in the availability.
Now Mono is packaged for the most important Linux distributions. You
can also get it through its own
Red Carpet
channel. Better Remoting support (we now have the BinaryFormatter
thanks to Lluis), System.Web.Mobile to support Mobile browsing among
others.
1.2 Gtk# 0.7 released
The Gtk#
team has provided us with a new release too. The changes since 0.6
are: the tutorial samples and monkeyguide docs spun off into separate
project. Build System fixes/enhancements, Metadata parameter fixes,
GStreamer fixes, Threading enhancements, GType registration
framework, libglade field binding enhancements, Gdk.Drawable and
Pango.Layout customizations, and Parser bugfixing.
1.3 Mono 0.18 released
The Mono team is proud to release Mono 0.18, with plenty of bug fixes
and improvements. If you are a happy 0.17 user, this release is a
happiness extension release. Many bugs in the runtime, class libraries
and C# compiler have been fixed. Some pills: we have many improvements to the
Mono VB.NET compiler. Authentication system in ASP.NET. And the remoting
infrastructure has got a big boost from Lluis in this release.
1.4 DB2 System.Data client contributed
Christopher Bockner has contributed a DB2 System.Data client. We have
a very complete range of data providers.
1.5 MacOS X support on the runtime
MacOS X support on the runtime has been integrated into the distribution,
and MCS works with it. Running most tests works too. Anyone with a
MacOSX system is welcome to try the code, report bugs and other
issues and, hopefully, send patches:-)
1.6 IKVM (a Java VM for .NET) runs with Mono
Zoltan has managed to get IKVM (a Java VM for .NET) to run with Mono. The
HelloWorld.class runs with the Mono runtime.
1.7 Gsirc is making great progress
Gsirc is Alp's lightweight and flexible IRC client for the .NET framework.
It makes use of Gtk# and is known to run on Linux and on Windows. It features
a handy full-screen mode (Flotilla) which is great for tracking dozens of IRC
channels on a dedicated X terminal or display. You can see it in action
here and get it at
Gsirc's site.
1.8 Mono Debugger released!
The Mono Debugger 0.2.0 "Boston" has been released. After almost half
a year of hacking, we finally have a first public release of the Mono
Debugger :-). The source code is available at
this
address.
This release depends on Mono 0.19 so if you are using an older
version, update!.
2. Meet the team. This week Atsushi Enomoto
The Mono team is integrated by contributors all over the world that are
working really hard to get this project going further. In this section
we will be meeting this people so we can know more about them and what
they are doing.
This week we are proud to present Atsushi Enomoto. Atsushi is a
newcomer to the Free Software comunity. He is a software engineer working
at a certain venture company for about 2 or 3 years. Sometimes he uses
dotnet with his job. The company he works for has many XML business, but
as for him, he has never met few scene to handle XML. Once upon a time, he
enjoyed MIDI programming when not working. He also likes to translate XML
related materials into Japanese. His recent concern is about cyberlaw, like
what professor Lawrence Lessig teaches since he was a law student studying
criminal law and intellectual property laws. Let's see what are his
interests in Mono and how is he contributing to make the project achieve
its goals.
Interview with Atsushi Enomoto
MWN: You are new to the Free Software community. How do you feel
about it?. Are you enjoying it?.
Atsushi Enomoto: I'm quite enjoying participating. I'm too new
to distinguish whether it is because of "Free Software" development from
simply hobby development but I think it is precious experience to know
how open software development goes.
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MWN: Why did you come to Mono?. What are the reasons that moved you to
choose it as the first OpenSource project to contribute to?.
Atshushi Enomoto: Well... I had been interested in Mono as the
alternative dotnet project. I hadn't ever used Mono (and still I
haven't wrote any application!), but subscribed to mono-list as a
read-only member. The first time I got involved in this project was
when Miguel wanted a little patch for XML library. Then I was
interested in XML and looked into that code and found that it was not
written in fact. Then I wrote first, very easy code and sent to
him. It was too incomplete and had very entry-level mistake. Miguel
advised me to write test. I was in trouble with test, and sent him I
may go to #mono and ask. I solved it myself, but after a few days,
Miguel sent me "feel free to come anytime," so then I thought I had
better (heh, I really thought "had better") go and see him to thank.
After that I received another help-wanted mail from duncan. I wrote
buggy code ;) again and sent him. Then Miguel asked me if I could
write more missing bits, then I started to get more involved into this
project. But I hadn't thought that means "as a maintainer"! I was really
surprised when I found that I was written about me as a "maintainer",
though it is no problem.
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MWN: So as one of the mono developers in the System.XML namespaces
(one of the basis parts of .net), what do you think about the
implementation you are doing?. What are the main benefits you think
Mono is bringing to Linux and the UNIX world with it?
Atsushi Enomoto: Before I got involved in this, I had thought
the important part such as XML must be more complete and ready-to-use,
because there are similar packages such as libxml, libxslt and
soup. In fact, it is not such stage. Then I think it should go ahead.
You must surprise if I say that I hadn't ever used dotnet XML library
so deeply, and moreover, I hadn't ever used libxml/libxslt. (I always
use Java parser such as xerces, or crimson. I'm not kind of linux
developer.). There are many features to finish. DTD (even though it is
legacy), XSLT, XML Schema, XML (de)serialization... I think I cannot
do everything by myself (I think I'm no more than basic-skilled
programmer in the world).
About benefits of Mono, I think this
project can provide alternatives of Microsoft. I don't think that
mono's value is simply because it can run on unix, because MS really
provide Rotor. I think mono is valuable because it is "free software."
As for Microsoft, they certainly cannot provide some of the software
we need, such that collaborates with GPLed software (it is only for
example). It is social reason, but not laughable. It is important that
dotnet's useful feature such as ASP.NET can be used in platform other
than Windows. XML is important again is this context ... xml based web
services.
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MWN: Do you think the way .NET handles XML and the related
technologies is as good as it promises?. What can you tell us about
it, as a Java programer?.
Atshushi Enomoto: Well, first to say, my Java experience is
not so deep. I'm really enter-level developer. As for So-called Web
Services, Microsoft is certainly playing one of the leader's role,
with many "standards" such as XML Schema, WS-I and even dotnet
itself. But I think it is not because they are with standards.
I'm suspicious of those effect of "standards" beleived that
"because it is standard." I think technology is used because it is
good (I think that Miguel is of good sense because he knows "what is
valuable" and what is not). So I think that if we use web services,
then we should always think "it is extending freedom" or not. To tell
the truth, I'm so new to mono, and to System.Xml. So I only know about
core feature of System.Xml namespace. Many programs such as monodoc,
ADO.NET, XML signature, or other libraries uses this feature. I think
this package itself is, however, far more complete. Formerly, there
were great implementor of this namespace, but now we need more help.
I think that many developers (like me) can participate to this
feature. XML is not so difficult. I can't say anything about other
tools, but I think it is important to get compatible with other
implementations, such as DotGNU and of course, Microsoft FCL. Such
effort makes ourselves "easy to use."
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MWN: Is there anything left you may want to say about which classes
or tools you find prioritary to implement so people reading this could
contribute?
Atsushi Enomoto: Humm... the easiest way is to write
applications. It is OK to try existing programs ...heh, but even for
myself I didn't yet ;) .I want anyone who help development of this
package such as XSLT, but there is no loadmap, so contributors (even
for myself) must be confused. As said below, I didn't know that I was
regarded one of the maintainers. Then I'll write some of the draft of
the plan.
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MWN: Thanks Atsushi. We are happy to see how developers from the
Microsoft Windows environment come to Linux and to Mono and contribute
to this project. Thanks for your time and your work.
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3. CVS Activity
This has been a busy week. Here are the results.
(*) Actually I am using the number of commits as measure, I will try to
get more accurate aproximations in the future. (Starting Jan 10th,
till Jan 20th)
Authors: Total 28
| Author | Commits |
| Ajay Kumar Dwivedi | 1 |
| Alejandro Sanchez | 65 |
| Alp Toker | 1 |
| Atsushi Enomoto | 7 |
| Christopher Bockner | 3 |
| Daniel Lopez | 6 |
| Daniel Morgan | 10 |
| Dietmar Maurer | 14 |
| Duncan Mak | 36 |
| Gaurav Vaish | 12 |
| Gonzalo Paniagua | 43 |
| Jackson Harper | 5 |
| Jeroen Janssen | 4 |
| Johannes Roith | 84 |
| Jonathan Pryor | 29 |
| Lluis Sanchez | 5 |
| Marco Ridoni | 4 |
| Martin Baulig | 218 |
| Miguel de Icaza | 42 |
| Mike Kestner | 1 |
| Nick Drochak | 9 |
| Paolo Molaro | 14 |
| Patrik Torstensson | 3 |
| Peter Williams | 7 |
| Rafael Teixeira | 5 |
| Rodrigo Moya | 11 |
| Sebastien Pouliot | 18 |
| Ville Palo | 12 |
| Zoltan Varga | 6 |
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| Modules | Commits |
| mono | 43 |
| mono/doc | 15 |
| mono/jit | 14 |
| mcs/mcs | 12 |
| mcs/class | 118 |
| mcs/class/corlib | 34 |
| mcs/class/System.Web | 25 |
| debugger | 211 |
| gtk-sharp | 37 |
| mbas | 5 |
| monodoc | 41 |
| mod_mono | 8 |
| xsp | 7 |
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4. Mailing List Activity
This has been a quite week in the Mono list. You can
see the scrollbar in your
Evolution
mailbox without forcing your eyes!.
The main points:
- Daniel Morgan has had very busy days contributing a lot to
the list. Some of the useful information he provided was about
SQL#. We now know that: SQL# For GTK# will be moved to its own
cvs module sqlsharpgtk, some of the data binding functionality
could be moved to a base class so other GTK Widgets can take
advantage of data binding. Please
read
for more info.
- A little bit of discussion about the array access
performance.
Please visit us at the homepage of the Mono Project:
http://www.go-mono.org
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