Mono Weekly News

:: the voice of the Mono Community

• 1. Headlines
• 1.1 How to use Windows.Forms in Linux
• 1.2 Second Mono Survey
• 1.3 Miguel tells it all at OSNEWs
• 1.4 New Mono community site
• 1.5 GtkMozEmbed, SWT and Gtk#-based NUnit tool
• 1.6 New compilation engine
• 1.7 First Mono Book is out; Team pages
• 2. Meet the team. This week Gonzalo Paniagua Javier
• 3. Mailing lists activity
• 4. CVS Activity
• 5. About this issue

1.1 How to use Windows.Forms in Linux

Alexandre has provided a modified version of the GC system that will work with and Mono. See the mono-winforms-list. It is now possible to run our Win32-based implementation of Windows.Forms with Mono on Linux. Looking for a screenshot, sure. And then you will likely want to enable this in your Linux box. Here is the recipe.

1.2 Second Mono Survey

There is a new Mono survey for all the people who are interested in developing with this free .NET Framework implemententation. If your company is involved with the development and deployment of web applications, if Linux is becoming an important part of your company's business application strategy, if you are considering Mono for your next project or if you would you like to shape the future of Mono and the use of Linux in business critical applications you should consider contacting mbadgett@ximian.com to learn what Mono can do for you.

1.3 Miguel tells it all at OSNEWs

Miguel was interviewed at OSNEWs about Mono and other projects as Gnumeric. A must read to those who are interested in the evolution of the Mono.

1.4 New Mono community site

A friend of Jackson has opened a Mono community site called Got Mono!. A bunch of the monoers already have their accounts there and are filling the forums discussing about Monkey Business... Come in and join.

1.5 GtkMozEmbed, SWT and Gtk#-based NUnit tool

Mark has checked his bindings for Gtk-based Mozilla into CVS, module name: `GtkMozEmbed'. Read the details. The SWT port to C# using Gtk is progressing. Screenshots are here. Gonzalo has checked in his Gtk#-based NUnit tool. Screenshots are here and here

1.6 New compilation engine

The new Mono compilation engine (yes!, mini!) has been placed on CVS. Miguel explained how to compile it (it's out of the main build) and use it here. Zoltan has commited his typed allocation patches to CVS as well.

1.7 First Mono Book is out; Team pages

The first book to cover Mono is out. This book is currently only available in German, you can find it here We now have a page for the Mono Team where we include a list of some of the people who have made Mono possible. If you have CVS access, please update the page to include your information.

2. Meet the team. This week Gonzalo Paniagua Javier

The Mono team is integrated by contributors all around 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.

Gonzalo is a 27 years old Ximian hacker (his birthday, Feb 29th) who was born in Plasencia, Spain, currently living in Playa de San Juan. In the past five years he has been working as a programmer for several computer companies building code with COBOL, Visual C++, Turbo C++, PHP, Java, C interacting with Oracle, DB2, CICS, etc.

He is also coordinator of the RFC spanish translation effort as well as a GNOME-DB contributor and one of the core dudes of the spanish free software community. In his spare time he likes programming (non-stop!) and his favourite language is C, which he enjoys writing with gvim. Though he doesn't like taking part in 'religious' wars about anything.

Interview with Gonzalo

MWN: Have you been involved in another free software projects before joining the mono team?

Gonzalo Paniagua: Yeah. A friend of mine (note of the editor: Gonzalo is referencing Carlos Perelló, one of the most appreciated free software hackers in Spain), convinced me to collaborate in the gnome-db effort and I joined them when the GNOME 2 port was getting shape. I used (and use) to spend my spare time programming my own stuff. This gave me the opportunity to join other people's efforts and collaborate in an interesting project. And I liked working that way.

MWN: So then you went to work for Ximian and you become the System.Web man...

Gonzalo Paniagua: Not that fast. First I was coding here and there (small fixes and such). Then integerformatter and then ASP.NET came into play.

MWN: Since you started with a inmature Mono you had to do a lot of work to get the basis for System.Web. Am I right?.

MWN: No, in fact, many things in System.Web were in place thanks to the work by Gaurav, Leen and Patrik. Duncan made the stuff compile. And then I took all of that and started my work adding the code generator, some glue and bug fixing. There was also some missing parts in other namespaces such as System.Configuration that we manage to implement in order to make System.Web work.

MWN: And you wrote the core System.Configuration and related classes...?

Gonzalo Paniagua Yeah. There was some work by Duncan and Christopher Podurgiel. I added the rest.

MWN:And what about ASP.NET, did you enjoy building it?

Gonzalo Paniagua: Yes!! It was hard to begin with the code generator but then one day the first page was rendered... And no one can stop us now ;-)..

MWN: As an expert in ASP.NET and .NET Web based technologies, what can you say about the desing?. Is ASP.NET as powerful as it promises?

Gonzalo Paniagua: Well, I don't consider myself an expert on anything. But I have to say that I didn't like web related stuff until I discovered ASP.NET. I like programming a web page as if I am programming a desktop application: events, components. And that's really cool.

MWN: Do you think ASP.NET will be replacing JSP?

Gonzalo Paniagua: I think so. And also MS does. It offers equivalent functionality + integration with all that .NET brings to us. But the transition will be slow. There is too much money invested in that and people will not change things to see what happens. They are not geeks that change their systems from one day to another. They care about money (TCO, as they call it). I hope mono helps them on this...

MWN: Apart of having the possibility of choosing any of the .NET languages, what are the other main benefits you encounter in ASP.NET that would make people use it instead of JSP?

Gonzalo Paniagua: Easy deploying, separation between HTML and code, highly configurable + all the services that .NET offers: security (isolation of applications), database access, distributed computing (remoting, web services).

MWN: What about your pet called 'XSP'? what can you tell us about the very first free ASP.NET server?

Gonzalo Paniagua: In the beginning that module contained only the code generator stuff (ASP.NET pages - C# code - assembly - load - execute). ie, the conversion from aspx to C# then i added some hacks (not compatible with MS) to make it serve the first mono ASP.NET page. Later on, I implemented the current server and made it work under MS runtime, then made mono work with that and remove those imcompatible hacks. The current server runs in both mono and MS rutime.

MWN: Do you expect to see many C# web controls around?. Any plans in Mono about them?.

Gonzalo Paniagua: Yes, I do. There are already vendors that provide some nice web controls such as treeviews. Also there are quite a few sites devoted to ASP.NET offering code samples and useful web controls. In XSP module we have a couple of control samples in the xsp module. Apart from that, there are no plans of creating more controls in Mono (yet). We welcome anyone to add more web controls to the xsp tests.

MWN: How is the mod_mono status, now?.

Gonzalo Paniagua The last time I tried (and no modificationes since then), it worked fine. I noticed that it's slower than xsp server, but that may be due to apache unloading the module (as yoros pointed out). Thus making the server compile the pages on every request as the cache is lost. Btw, I'm not the maintainer of that module. Daniel Lopez is tha man.

MWN: What is Mono going to use mainly?. Will you recommend xsp or apache + mod_mono?

Gonzalo Paniagua: XSP is just a test toy. So there's only another option by now ;-). The remoting work by Lluis, Patrik and the runtime guys was an important milestone for ASP.NET to get in shape.

3. Mailing lists activity

As the MWN were stopped for more than a week. I will be making a resume starting March the 17th through April the 16th.

• Duncan sent a very nice link for all of you that like coding Python. You will find information about how to do use the power of the CLI while scripting Python.
• Dennis Hayes, one of the Mono contributors, is now writing for the ".NET developers journal". Let's show what he sent to the list: "Starting with the April issue, I will be writing a monthly column in the ".NET Developers Journal". The name of the column is "Monkey Business", and it will be news about developments in open source implantations of .NET, Rotor, Mono, and Gnu.NET. You can read a blurb about a March article on Mono, "What the Monkey Can Do", and see the cover at http://www.sys-con.com/dotnet, but you have to subscribe before you can read the article or column. May's column is done, but if there is anything you want to appear in the June column, email me".
• Per Arneng announced that the System.Web.Mail namespace is finished.
• Jackson Harper told us that the GotMono! site has openned its doors. So come and join all the members of the forums. We know have a reference were to post all our ideas. It can be a very good alternative to the mailing lists, specially if you want to discuss about patents or other 'metaphysics'
• Miguel provided us with the right site to start looking for the CIL GCC frontend. So if you are interested in learning more about it, you now know that the address is: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jds31/research/gccnet.
• Darren Hiebert announced the C# support provided by ctags-5.5. You can get it at the ctags sourceforge project.
• David Jeske and Stefan Mathias Aust wrote two interesting summaries about C# generics. With lots of useful information you should read. The mails are this and this.
• If you want to try the new compilation engine, you should read this email from Miguel.

4. CVS Activity

Let's see what have been doing the monoers along this month. These are the results from April the 1st through April the 16th.

Total of contributors: 46 Total of commits: 1087

5. About this issue