[Mono-dev] Version 0.80 "Terrania City" of the Mono Debugger has been released

[Martin Baulig]

Hi guys,

Just released version 0.80 "Terrania City" of the Mono Debugger :-)

The biggest news is that the debugger now has support for C# 2.0
features such as generics, anonymous methods and iterators:

  * We can currently print fields in generic instances, print their
    types and parent classes.

  * Recursive generic types (see test/src/TestRecursiveGenerics.cs for
    an example) are supported, but need more testing.

  * There is some limited support for method invocations, but we can't
    get their types yet.

  * Support for anonymous methods and iterators should now be pretty
    much complete; we can fully access captured variables etc.

Unfortunately, the debugger doesn't work with the released Mono 1.9
anymore, you need to grab the latest mono from SVN HEAD.

You also need to recompile all applications and library you want to
debug, since the symbol file format changed; the debugger doesn't
support the old symbol file format any longer.

If you just want to use `mono --debug' without the debugger, there is no
need to recompile anything, since the runtime supports both the old and
the new symbol file format.

This is something like a last-minute release - I spent the last three
months working on this in a private work branch and now it's finally
done basically in the last second.  Tomorrow, I'll leave for two weeks
of vacations.

Usually it's a bad idea to commit a large bunch of changes a few hours
before running away, but I really wanted to use the chance of getting
some extensive user testing and feedback while I'm away.  However, I did
a lot of testing the last three days and I'm pretty sure there won't be
any unexpected problems.  Of course, since there is a lot of new code in
the release, it may not have the same stability than previous debugger
releases.

Ok, that's it basically from me - wish you all a lot of fun debugging
your C# 2.0 applications with mdb.

I'll be back on April 1st, awaiting all your feedback and bug reports.

Martin

-- 
Martin Baulig - martin at novell.com
Novell GmbH, Düsseldorf
GF: Volker Smid, Djamel Souici; HRB 21108 (AG Düsseldorf)