Mono Weekly News (Jan 30th, 2003)

http://www.go-mono.org

1.1 Mono Project wins best Open Source Project

1.2 Virtuoso 3.0 ships with Mono

1.3 Screenshots page

1.4 Mono on MSNBC

1.5 Beginnings of Alpha trampoline

1.6 Mbas improvements

2. Meet the team. This week Lluis Sanchez

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 Lluis Sanchez. Lluis is a software engineer from Igualada that now resides in Barcelona, Catalunya (Spain). He has been working for seven years for a company located in Spain as a consultant for projects mainly bases on Microsoft technologies although during the last years he has been using a lot of Java. One month ago he decided to finish his consultant career ("forever, I hope", Lluis says) and he is currently unemployed. "And that's why I've so much time to work in mono ;-)" he explains.

We must say that as for Enomoto, this is the first open source community project he contributes to, which has introduced him to the Linux world too, since he started to play with it two months ago in order to develop with and for Mono. During his free time he enjoys what he calls 'traditional hobbies' as watching movies and reading a lot (specially SF) as well as traveling and taking photos with his digital camera.

Interview with Lluis Sanchez

MWN: So Lluis, why are you interested in a project like Mono?. Can you explain us why did you decided to contribute to this open source project?.

Lluis Sanchez: Well. I've very interested in Mono as a server platform. I think it may be key to the success of Mono. In the last two years I've seen a tendency in small and medium companies to introduce Linux as a server. So I find very interesting to help on this evolution of mono and Linux.

MWN: And why did you choose to start with Remoting?.

luis Sanchez: Remoting is the key for using mono as a server platform And the base for a mono based application server. I'm very interested in developing or helping to develop an application server based on .NET that could run on Linux and working in the development of remoting is allowing me to learn a lot of things that would be needed in such a project. I also like very much distributed computing :-)

MWN: What are the main benefits you encounter in .NET Remoting that you think are so important for a distributed environment?

Lluis Sanchez: Well, Remoting makes very easy the development of distributed applications. For windows developers, comparing to DCOM, it is much easier to use, to configure, to deploy... it gives much more flexibility comparing to Java RMI, I think the main benefit is flexibility. The same remoting framework can be used for any kind of communication, using any format. The big advantage of remoting is that you can build your own channels and formatters and then you can interact using any of the protocols you implemented, as you could do with CORBA. Remoting also benefits from other nice features of .NET like assembly versioning, serialization, ...

MWN: Do you think that we can see 'the Mono' as the missing link between the Microsoft world and the UN*X world when talking about cross-platform application development?

(Lluis laughs)

Lluis Sanchez: yes indeed for windows developers it will be very easy to start developing programs for UN*X now. Companies that traditionally develop its programs for MS technologies, will find that with a little more effort they can deploy also their applications in UN*X. This may change their point of view when planning projects and it is not only about portability for example a software developer or software architect that only knows MS technologies, will only consider using MS as a server platform now, he/she can also consider using Linux and Mono as a server platform. With the same skills (almost). Then, he/she is not using mono because it is portable, but because it can run on Linux, which is cheap.

MWN: During your investigations on Remoting, have you seen anything in the design that could be improved or that you think you could advice of?

Lluis Sanchez: It's difficult to say. Remoting has a complex design. Sometimes I see some design decisions that I don't fully understand or for which I think that there is a better solutions, but in general I like it.

MWN: Which are those strange design decisions you mention?, can you remember them?

Lluis Sanchez: Just details. Sometimes I see methods that are public and maybe should not, or some methods that seem to do the same in different classes... Well, one area of improvement would be how information is serialized. The binary format used by BinaryFormatter could produce a more compact serialization than it does now.

MWN: After remoting is finished what would you like to do?, maybe contribute to a CORBA implementation for Mono or porting existing ones as harmless or OpenORB?

Lluis Sanchez: There is still a lot of work to do in Remoting :-). I would enjoy contributing to a CORBA implementation although it is not one of my priorities. After remoting, I think that I will focus on EnterpriseServices. But it is hard to say...

MWN: Is there anything you would like to say to the community before we go?.

Lluis Sanchez: Yes. I'm very proud to be able to participate in this project. I'll like to thank all people that is making it a reality. And for any question about remoting, here I am. :-)

MWN: Thanks for your time, Lluis.

3. Mailing List Activity

• Some of us, we have been shown that the parser never sees comments and then you can put comments wherever you want that the compiler will not complain.
• Rafael wrote an interesting email for those that want to know how to run C# applets.
• Paolo told us how to contribute to the ilasm tool. Here is how.
• Lluis has written the a description about the current status of the Remoting implementation.
• Jonathan Pryor told us what Dwarf is.
• Derek Ferguson pointed article on Mono.

4. CVS Activity