[Mono-devel-list] User-defined explicit conversions and LDAP

[Olof Härwell]

Hi All

New to the list and Mono in general I have two questions (that I got 
after starting to port my existing work to Mono):

How is the status/strategy regarding LDAP in Mono?
Should the Mono.Directory.LDAP be extended and continue to use external 
lib? Or should the Microsoft.DirectoryServices be implemented in a way 
that is doesn't use ADSI? One idea could maybe be to port the 
OpenLDAP/Novell JLDAP (http://www.openldap.org/jldap/) to c#. This would 
give use a framework that isn't dependent on any external libs. Any 
comments?

Also, I couldn't get the nice User-Defined explicit cast-feature to work 
  as it did in MS CLR. Is this feature not supported yet? (More info 
about it below)

User-Defined Conversions Tutorial
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/csref/html/vcwlkuser-definedconversionstutorial.asp>

6.4.4 User-defined explicit conversions
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/csspec/html/vclrfcsharpspec_6_4.asp>

This didn't work (wasn't called at all when it should):
<snip>
public static implicit operator string(ConfigurationItem item)
{
	return item.Value;
}
</snip>