Mono Weekly News. Feb 21th, 2003

http://www.go-mono.org

1.1 New assemblies in the Mono CVS

1.2 Authenticode and more

1.3 Polish site

1.4 OpenGL# bindings for Mono

1.5 Mono Basic updates

1.6 Volunteers to document Gtk#

1.7 Mono talks

2. Meet the team. This week Johannes Roith

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.

Johannes Roith is a 17 old monoer from Cham (Bavaria), Germany who is attending to classes at the German Gymnasium. He enjoys listening to Rap, Oasis and The Beatles and watching Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and James Bond ones in special. He likes Italian, Bavarian and Greek food and he is preparing a trip to Italy in the next two weeks. In his free time hi likes to go skiing and snowboarding.

Interview with Johannes

MWN: Have you ever been involved with the OpenSource movement before you joined the Mono Project?

Johannes Roith: Not actively. I tracked Slashdot, had Linux installed, but I did not contribute. Except maybe bug reports for Mozilla and some sf.net projects. I can't remember. I just report if I found one.

MWN: Do you have any programming background then?

Johannes Roith: I've programmed as a hobbyist and for some local projects. I started with Pascal and PHP as well as Java.

MWN: Why did you come to Mono?

Johannes Roith: When MS announced .NET, I was interested immediately. I downloaded some beta and started using it. However I quickly felt locked into windows, as all other languages I've used before were multi-platform, and I could use them on my Linux box as well. When I heard about Mono, I was even more excited, because this solved my little problem. As many people of the team also are Gnome developers I started to also track Gnome development and started programming for GNOME. So the multi-platform thing is not the primary concern, why I'm at mono, now. But it was the reason I joined. Also Mono and the Mono team make it very easy to help out, as their is plenty of stuff to do, and they help you to get started with something quickly. So I took the chance to contribute some bits to OpenSource.

MWN: You are the one that started the MonkeyGuide, don't you?

Johannes Roith: Yes. I had contributed some bits to the Gnome.NET tutorial, first. Later I wrote something about ADO.NET and ASP.NET and collected it in "MonkeyGuide". When I saw there was much interest in it, I've extended the document, and it covers now almost anything from installation to learning C#, programming with Gnome, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, but there is still plenty of stuff to do.

MWN: It was been shown that one of the problems with GNOME was the lack of a good set of documentation since it's beginning. Devhelp, ggad... they all helped but it's not enough. What do you think about the Mono documentation how is it planned?.

Johannes Roith: Good documentation can save many hours of frustration When "The Mono Handbook", thats the new name for MonkeyGuide is finished I'll start working on the Gtk# documentation.

MWN: As the monodoc browser is there are you planning to move the MonkeyGuide to monodoc format so it can be integrated in monodoc browser?

Johannes Roith: It turned out that this is pretty easy and straight forward, as the monodoc browser uses gtkhtml to render the docs. MonkeyGuide is HTML, with CSS stylesheets, so it takes just a few minutes to change some styles for better integration. Theoretically it should work in it's current form in the browser, but for consistency some design changes may be needed. So it will integrate perfectly without changing anything in the HTML files. It will be in definitely.

MWN: Since a lot of documentation can be reused from the MS documentation, will the priority go to the Mono specific modules?

Johannes Roith: Yes, Gtk# and the Mono.* namespaces are a priority, but we must be carefully not to break copyright from MS. That's why the other bits need work as well, although currently people can use the on-line documentation from Microsoft.

MWN: About the documentation of Gtk# and GNOME which are the next widgets you think should be first documented? Is there any order you are following or do you have any way people can ask for it?

Johannes Roith: I simply start with the widgets used most often and the ones useful for a step-by-step tutorial.

MWN:.NET Metadata is full of 'documentation' is it being used in order to get documentation in an automatic way or do you have to get it all by hand.

Johannes Roith: The monodoc XML format does create stub docs automatically, but the rest has to be done by hand. It's more about describing and eventually giving examples.

MWN: Is there anything left you want to say to the Mono World?

Johannes Roith: I think Mono is really different from other projects, not only because of the great technology itself, but also the nice and friendly people working on it. A big thanks to all the other hackers working on it!

3. Mailing List Activity

• Lots of senseless flame about the patents issue. We don't want to make more echo about that so please refer to the Mono FAQ for the solution.
• Some people seems to be interested in the scripting in .NET. If you are one of those here you have an email you might want to read.
• Miguel wrote an interesting email about some runtime internals.

4. CVS Activity