[Mono-list] Mono Weekly News (December 10th - 17th, 2002)
Jaime Anguiano Olarra
jaime@gnome.org
18 Dec 2002 21:11:18 +0100
--=-C6oaSzZ6p4phqU4sha5N
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=-l2Fbhy/nwAGg/6VxFluB"
--=-l2Fbhy/nwAGg/6VxFluB
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Here it is!
--
// http://www.go-mono.org -- The Mono Project. .NET + freedom.
--=-l2Fbhy/nwAGg/6VxFluB
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/1.0.4">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Here it is!
<TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%">
<TR>
<TD>
<PRE>--
// http://www.go-mono.org -- The Mono Project. .NET + freedom.
</PRE>
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
</BODY>
</HTML>
--=-l2Fbhy/nwAGg/6VxFluB--
--=-C6oaSzZ6p4phqU4sha5N
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=MWN-Dec-16-2002.html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; name=MWN-Dec-16-2002.html; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968
<html>
<head>
<title>Mono Weekly News. Dec 16th, 2002</title>
</head>
<h1>Mono Weekly News (Dec 16th, 2002)</h1>
<p><b>Overview</b></p>
<p>
Welcome to the second MWN letter. As the year is ending, it's time to
look back and see what the Mono people had been doing. We also start=20
a two new sections, "the Mono spell" and "Meet the team".=20
</p>
<p>
<b>Table of contents
<ul>
<li>1. Headlines.
<ul><li>1.1 Mono Commercial uses.</li>
<li>1.2 Mono's ASP.NET does 1% of the market in one week!</li>
<li>1.3 More changes to MonoBasic.</li>
<li>1.4 Transactions available in System.Data with Xml.</li>
<li>1.5 Multiple threads support in the debugger.</li>
<li>1.6 Reflection.Emit can be used in Run mode.</li>
<li>1.7 More work in the NUnit 2 integration.</li>
<li>1.8 Lots of improvements in ASP.NET.</li>
<li>1.9 Mono Annual Report.</li>
<li>1.10 Platano's out and GNOME# for Debian too!.</li>
<li>1.11 Miguel and Mono in Business2.com.</li>=20
<li>1.12 Miguel for the Renegade Awards.</li>
</ul>
<li>2. Meet the team. This week Sebastien Pouliot.</li>
<li>3. The Mono Spell.</li>
<li>4. CVS Activity.</li>
<li>5. Mailing List Activity.</li>
</ul>
</b>
</p>
<p> <h3>1.1 Mono Commercial uses.</h3>
<p> <a href=3D"http://www.tipic.com">Tipic</a> today <a href=3D"http://www=
.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=3Dtipic_mono=
">announced</a>=20
their work on porting their Instant Messaging Server platform to run o=
n=20
Mono. <a href=3D"http://www.winfessor.com">Winfessor</a> also=20
<a href=3D"http://www.winfessor.com/press.asp">announced</a> the=20
availability of their Jabber SDK to run on Mono.eAlso two weeks ago we=
=20
mentioned <a href=3D"http://www.openlinksw.com">OpenLink Software's</a=
> <a href=3D"http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/ind=
ex.html?pr=3Dopenlink_mono">announcement</a> of their product, also using M=
ono.=20
</p>
<p> <h3>1.2 Mono's ASP.NET does 1% of the market in one week!</h3></p>
<p> <a href=3D"http://www.netcraft.com">Netcraft</a> has published this=20
<a href=3D"http://www.netcraft.com/survey/">survey</a> where you can r=
ead the
following statement: "around 1% of internet sites using ASP.Net are Li=
nux=20
based, but it is early days both for the Mono project and for .Net its=
elf,=20
and both will be hoping to grow very significantly from current levels=
."=20
If you want to read more on this, follow this=20
<a href=3D"http://www.netcraft.com/survey/">link</a>.
</p>
<p> <h3>1.3 More changes to MonoBasic.</h3></p>
<p> Marco has been working a lot in the MonoBasic implementation and now t=
he=20
Try/Catch/Finally statements work, statically declared events work,
For/Next/Step also work and properties work too!.
<p> <h3>1.4 Transactions available in System.Data with Xml.</h3></p>
<p> Ville has done some coding on XmlDataDocument. XmlDataDocument is=20
the class which "communicates" with DataSet, so these "transactions"=20
means updating, deleting, and adding DataRows and Datacolumns to DataS=
et.
</p>
<p> <h3>1.5 Multiple threads support in the debugger.</h3></p>
=09
<p> The debugger is now getting multi-thread debugging support. Details:=20
a global thread lock mechanism has been added, a new command line=20
interface is there for everybody to use. Getting registers is working=20
again. The ScriptingContext now supports a synchronous (for the=20
command-line interpreter) and an asynchronous (for the gui) interface.=
=20
BackTraceView is working. The handling of synchronous commands was=20
improved.=20
</p>
<p> <h3>1.6 Reflection.Emit can be used in Run mode.</h3></p>
<p>
Zoltan Varga has contributed the support for running code generated by=20
Reflection.Emit. This means Reflection.Emit now support 'Run' mode and =
not
only 'Save' mode as before. This allows us to generate code on the fly
and hand it over to the JIT. Now we will be able to JIT compiler our=20
regular expression patterns like MS implementation does.
</p>
<p> <h3>1.7 More work in NUnit 2 integration.</h3></p>
<p> A lot of test suites were added, as the ones for Publisher and=20
PublisherMembershipCondition, for DataSet, Xml-tests, for StrongName,
and StrongNamePublicKeyBlob.
</p>
<p> <h3>1.8 Lots of improvements in ASP.NET.</h3></p>
<p> Gonzalo has revised the C# generator that is much efficient than before=
,
the user controls' automatic events are activated now properly. His wor=
k
has made possible to load .ascx controls per program, to get datalist
fixed and now all the test are working, the @Page, @Application and
@Control are now available and he has started the authentification=20
support using Forms. He has also fixed a coupple of validators and=20
got the kernel32.dll not found warning out!.
</p>=20
<p> <h3>1.9 Mono Annual Report.</h3></p>
<p> No doubt, this has been the year where Mono has proved to be a serious
project that is accomplishing the heraldic task of building an
opensource implementation of .NET that will be available for everybody.
After twelve months of development it's time to look back and see the
what we have been doing.=20
<a href=3D"http://monoevo.sourceforge.net/mono/annualreport.txt">Here</=
a>
you can find a little resume with some OpenCalc=20
<a href=3D"http://monoevo.sourceforge.net/mono/annuareport.sxc">charts<=
/a>.
</p>
<p> <h3>1.10 Platano's out and GNOME# for Debian too!.</h3></p>
<p> Alp Toker has released <a href=3D"http://www.atoker.com/platano/">Plata=
no</a>,=20
the very first Mono based media player. He has also packaged GNOME#=20
capable packages, the deb urls are these:=20
</p>
<p> <ul>
<li>deb http://www.debianplanet.org/mono unstable main</li>
<li>deb-src http://www.debianplanet.org/mono unstable main</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p> <h3>1.11 Miguel and Mono in Business2.com.</h3></p>
<p> Business2.com has published a very nice article about Miguel and Mono,
you can read it=20
<a href=3D"https://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,45454,FF.html"=
>here<a>.
If you get the magazine in print you can see a penguin and Miguel weari=
ng a=20
suit!.
</p>
<p> <h3>1.12 Miguel for the Renegade Awards.</h3></p>
<p> Miguel is one of the five people on the list of people on Wired Magazin=
e's=20
"Wired Rave Awards", for the 'Renegade of Year' award. So now you can v=
ote
for him <a href=3D"http://www.raveawards.com">here</a> if you live insi=
de the
USA. If you don't... well, try to work out something.
</p>
=20
<p> <h3>2. Meet the team. This week Sebastien Pouliot.</h3></p>
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.=20
</p>
<p>
This week we have been talking to Sebastien Pouliot in the IRC. Sebasti=
en
is the developer who has worked out most of the Cryptography classes in=
=20
Mono. Let's see what he told us (before the kids came back!).
</p>
<h4>Interview with Sebastien Pouliot</h4>
<table border=3D1 width=3D"100%">
<tr><td>
<p><b>MWN: So, Sebastien, would you like to explain to the Mono Community w=
hich=20
are your interests in Mono?</b>
</p>
<p><b>S.Pouliot:</b> I've been following mono evolution for the last year, =
well=20
soon after I started programming in C#, as I was looking for people using t=
he=20
crypto classes.
</p>
<p><b>MWN: And why did you took the System.Crypto namespace classes?. Are y=
ou=20
a security developer?</b>
</p>
<p><b>S.Pouliot:</b> My work involves security. However we don't often get =
the=20
chance to code low-level stuff - like encryption algorithms. Those are almo=
st=20
always available before stating a project. I'm a security architect. I desi=
gn=20
security solution for products and some consulting for Motus Technologies=20
(http://www.motus.com).
</p>
<p><b>MWN: Since you are the Cryptography expert in the Mono Team, what can=
you=20
say about the security design in .NET and the implementation Mono is doing?=
.</b>
</p>
<p><b>S.Pouliot:</b> The .NET design (both CLR and the class library) is a =
big=20
step toward a better security architecture. Just using managed code should =
solve=20
many of the current security issues (like stack overrun). Mono is currently=
=20
building features into it's class library. Eventually we'll have to ensure =
that=20
every access to ressource is correctly protected. This will take some time =
but,=20
being open-source, I'm sure mono will get (at least) as secure as the Micro=
soft=20
implementation.
</p>
<p><b>MWN: You have been in touch with a lot of the software in the Mono so=
urce=20
tree, which of the classes you have contributed to are the ones you believe=
are
more useful for the other developers?.</b>
</p>
<p><b>S.Pouliot:</b> This is difficult to answer. Most people won't use any=
of=20
the security classes directly. X509 certificates and RSA are the classes th=
at=20
may get used without the knowledge of the developpers like in code signing,=
=20
permissions... the base are already there but more work is needed before we=
see=20
them in action. Hopefully more and more developers will start using=20
higher-level classes, i.e. outside Cryptography. It's so much easier to upg=
rade=20
a SOAP web service to use WS-Security than to build your own secure=20
communication. I'm just starting to look where are the crypto classes being=
=20
used in the framework. So far I've compiled a small list inside corlib. I=20
expect to find much more of them in other assembly. The hard part is gettin=
g=20
people with different expertises to work at a single issue the same time -=20
instead of iteratively. And this will be needed to complete the most comple=
x=20
classes (like Xml Signature which mix XML and digital signature).
</p>
<p><b>MWN: Anything you'd like to say to the world?</b></p>
<p><b>S.Pouliot:</b> One last thing. I was very lucky with people and I reu=
sed=20
their own sources into Mono (like Sergey's MiniParser, BouncyCastle's=20
asymmetric key generation, Chew Keong TAN's BigInteger class). Much of my=20
work wouldn't be apparent without all those donations. Many thanks to them!
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p> <h3>3. The Mono Spell.</h3></p>
<p> <i>I have much to learn about platanos :-)</i>. Alp Toker, our Platano=
guy.</p>=20
<p> <h3>4. CVS Activity.</h3></p>
=09
<p> This has been a bussy week. Here are the results.
(*) Actually I am using the number of commits as measure, I will try t=
o=20
get more accurate aproximations in the future. (Starting Dec 10th,
till Dec 17th)
</p>=09
<p> Authors: Total 26</p>
<p><table border=3D1>
<tr><td><b>Author</b></td><td><b>Commits</b></td></tr>
<tr><td>Alejandro Sanchez</td><td>5</td></tr>
<tr><td>Daniel Morgan</td><td>12</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dennis Hayes</td><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dick Porter</td><td>4</td></tr>
<tr><td>Duncan Mak</td><td>4</td></tr>
<tr><td>Eduardo Garcia</td><td>2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Gaurav Vaish</td><td>2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Gonzalo Paniagua</td><td>48</td></tr>
<tr><td>Jackson Harper</td><td>3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Jaime Anguiano</td><td>7</td></tr>
<tr><td>Jeroen Janssen</td><td>14</td></tr>
<tr><td>Johannes Roith</td><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Jonathan Pryor</td><td>2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Juli Mallett</td><td>10</td></tr>
<tr><td>Marco Ridoni</td><td>11</td></tr>
<tr><td>Martin Baulig</td><td>116</td></tr>
<tr><td>Miguel de Icaza</td><td>38</td></tr>
<tr><td>Mike Kestner</td><td>1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Nick Drochak</td><td>3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Rachel Hestilow</td><td>7</td></tr>
<tr><td>Ravi Pratap</td><td>2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Sebastien Pouliot</td><td>13</td></tr>
<tr><td>Tim Haynes</td><td>3</td></tr>
<tr><td>Ville Palo</td><td>17</td></tr>
<tr><td>Zoltan Varga</td><td>3</td></tr>
</table>
</p>
<p>=20
<table border=3D1>
<tr><td><b>Modules</b></td><td><b>Commits</b></td></tr>
<tr><td>mono</td><td>50</td></tr>
<tr><td>mono/jit</td><td>3</td></tr>
<tr><td>mcs/mcs</td><td>12</td></tr>
<tr><td>mcs/class</td><td>99</td></tr>
<tr><td>mcs/class/corlib</td><td>28</tr>
<tr><td>mcs/class/System.Web</td><td>19</td></tr>
<tr><td>debugger</td><td>116</td></tr>
<tr><td>Windows.Forms</td><td>3</td></tr>
<tr><td>MonoLOGO</td><td>7</td></tr>
<tr><td>gtk-sharp</td><td>19</td></tr>
<tr><td>mbas</td><td>14</td></tr>
<tr><td>monodoc</td><td>12</td></tr>
<tr><td>mphoto</td><td>1</td></tr>
</table>
</p>
<p> <h3>5. Mailing List Activity.</h3></p>
<p> Most of the mails were related to errors when installing and/or running=
the=20
new release of Mono. Finally new packages were released and all those p=
roblems
disappeared.
</p>
<p> There was some discussion about why is Nant being used instead of make,=
the
answer is simple: "Sean thought it was better than make and volunteered=
to=20
do the work".
</p>
<p> People have noticed that Mono is being monitored by lots of media. And =
they=20
have sent emails reflecting this. Here are some interesting links:
<a href=3D"http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=3D2=
7580">Wininformant</a>,
<a href=3D"http://news.com.com/2100-1001-977080.html">News.Com</a> and=20
<a href=3D"http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-977080.html">Zdnet</a>.
</p>
<p> The C++ and CLR thread was also quite interesting. Someone was asking i=
f CIL and Mono
support the multiple inheritance and related questions. The fact is the=
CIL doesn't
need to be modified, multiple-inheritance is supported by C++ and Eiffe=
l using=20
different mechanisms. The Mono team position is clear, remaining
compatibility with Microsoft CIL is more important than extending issue=
s so people
are invited to do their reseach using the Mono platform and then submit=
ting the=20
propose to ECMA for standarization, but that is not going to be done fr=
om Mono (at
least in a long time).
</p>
<p> Please visit us at the homepage of the Mono Project:
<a href=3D"http://www.go-mono.org">http://www.go-mono.org</a></p>
</html>
--=-C6oaSzZ6p4phqU4sha5N--