[Mono-devel-list] VB Runtime and license

Paolo Molaro lupus at ximian.com
Wed Apr 2 10:00:53 EST 2003


Mail sent only to mono-devel-list, it doesn't make sense to cross-post.

On 03/31/03 Marco Ridoni wrote:
> Somewhere on the Mono site there is a recommendation about not 
> decompiling/resourcing a class when reimplementing it for Mono, so one is 
> (and rightly so, IMO) supposed to start from scratch, having only the API and 
> the .NET SDK as a reference. 
> 
> Fine. The problem is that Microsoft.VisualBasic, apart from obvious things 
> like Date(), Val(), Str(), etc. is completely undocumented (especially 
> CompilerServices). While it is still easy to understand what methods like 
> IntegerType.FromString (String) do, how is one supposed to legally gain a bit 
> of knowledge about, e.g. the meaning and usage of methods like 
> LateBinding.lateIndexGet(), etc? We are at a point where these function are 
> starting to be badly needed to improve mBas, so I guess we should try to find 
> a solution.
> 
> Any suggestion, as usual, is welcome

There are several people that seem interested on having VB.net support
in mono: my suggestion is to get them to do the research by whatever
means are legal in their country (in many countries reverse engineering
is allowed for interoperability reasons). This includes, of course,
asking MS nicely to provide the documentation. Anyway, such people will
write down the documentation for the methods and you and Rafael (and
anyone else that didn't actually do the reverse engineering) can
safely implement them in the runtime assembly for VB.
I guess a first step is to collect a list of such functions and
to publish it here and maybe also on the web (you can maintain it as a
file in cvs) and asking people to contribute the documentation.

lupus

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