[Mono-list] Here it is the definitive 2nd Mono Weekly News letter

Fawad Halim fawad@fawad.net
Wed, 18 Dec 2002 17:05:45 -0600


Hi,
    I'll be archiving copies of the MWN at 
http://www.linuxpakistan.net/doc/mwn/ in case someone needs them for 
reference.

-fawad

Jaime Anguiano Olarra wrote:

>-- 
>// http://www.go-mono.org -- The Mono Project. .NET + freedom.
>        
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>   Mono Weekly News (Dec 16th, 2002)
>
> *Overview*
>
> 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 a 
> two new sections, "the Mono spell" and "Meet the team".
>
> *Table of contents
>
>     * 1. Headlines.
>           o 1.1 Mono Commercial uses.
>           o 1.2 Mono's ASP.NET does 1% of the market in one week!
>           o 1.3 More changes to MonoBasic.
>           o 1.4 Transactions available in System.Data with Xml.
>           o 1.5 Multiple threads support in the debugger.
>           o 1.6 Reflection.Emit can be used in Run mode.
>           o 1.7 More work in the NUnit 2 integration.
>           o 1.8 Lots of improvements in ASP.NET.
>           o 1.9 Mono Annual Report.
>           o 1.10 Platano's out and GNOME# for Debian too!.
>           o 1.11 Miguel and Mono in Business2.com.
>           o 1.12 Miguel for the Renegade Awards.
>     * 2. Meet the team. This week Sebastien Pouliot.
>     * 3. The Mono Spell.
>     * 4. CVS Activity.
>     * 5. Mailing List Activity.
>
> *
>
>
>       1.1 Mono Commercial uses.
>
> Tipic <http://www.tipic.com> today announced 
> <http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=tipic_mono> 
> their work on porting their Instant Messaging Server platform to run 
> on Mono. Winfessor <http://www.winfessor.com> also announced 
> <http://www.winfessor.com/press.asp> the availability of their Jabber 
> SDK to run on Mono.eAlso two weeks ago we mentioned OpenLink 
> Software's <http://www.openlinksw.com> announcement 
> <http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=openlink_mono> 
> of their product, also using Mono.
>
>
>       1.2 Mono's ASP.NET does 1% of the market in one week!
>
> Netcraft <http://www.netcraft.com> has published this survey 
> <http://www.netcraft.com/survey/> where you can read the following 
> statement: "around 1% of internet sites using ASP.Net are Linux based, 
> but it is early days both for the Mono project and for .Net itself, 
> and both will be hoping to grow very significantly from current 
> levels." If you want to read more on this, follow this link 
> <http://www.netcraft.com/survey/>.
>
>
>       1.3 More changes to MonoBasic.
>
> Marco has been working a lot in the MonoBasic implementation and now 
> the Try/Catch/Finally statements work, statically declared events 
> work, For/Next/Step also work and properties work too!.
>
>
>       1.4 Transactions available in System.Data with Xml.
>
> Ville has done some coding on XmlDataDocument. XmlDataDocument is the 
> class which "communicates" with DataSet, so these "transactions" means 
> updating, deleting, and adding DataRows and Datacolumns to DataSet.
>
>
>       1.5 Multiple threads support in the debugger.
>
> The debugger is now getting multi-thread debugging support. Details: a 
> global thread lock mechanism has been added, a new command line 
> interface is there for everybody to use. Getting registers is working 
> again. The ScriptingContext now supports a synchronous (for the 
> command-line interpreter) and an asynchronous (for the gui) interface. 
> BackTraceView is working. The handling of synchronous commands was 
> improved.
>
>
>       1.6 Reflection.Emit can be used in Run mode.
>
> Zoltan Varga has contributed the support for running code generated by 
> 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 regular expression patterns like MS implementation does.
>
>
>       1.7 More work in NUnit 2 integration.
>
> A lot of test suites were added, as the ones for Publisher and 
> PublisherMembershipCondition, for DataSet, Xml-tests, for StrongName, 
> and StrongNamePublicKeyBlob.
>
>
>       1.8 Lots of improvements in ASP.NET.
>
> Gonzalo has revised the C# generator that is much efficient than 
> before, the user controls' automatic events are activated now 
> properly. His work 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 support using Forms. He has also fixed a coupple 
> of validators and got the kernel32.dll not found warning out!.
>
>
>       1.9 Mono Annual Report.
>
> 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. Here 
> <http://monoevo.sourceforge.net/mono/annualreport.txt> you can find a 
> little resume with some OpenCalc charts 
> <http://monoevo.sourceforge.net/mono/annualreport.sxc>.
>
>
>       1.10 Platano's out and GNOME# for Debian too!.
>
> Alp Toker has released Platano <http://www.atoker.com/platano/>, the 
> very first Mono based media player. He has also packaged GNOME# 
> capable packages, the deb urls are these:
>
>     * deb http://www.debianplanet.org/mono unstable main
>     * deb-src http://www.debianplanet.org/mono unstable main
>
>
>       1.11 Miguel and Mono in Business2.com.
>
> Business2.com has published a very nice article about Miguel and Mono, 
> you can read it here 
> <https://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,45454,FF.html>. If you 
> get the magazine in print you can see a penguin and Miguel wearing a 
> suit!.
>
>
>       1.12 Miguel for the Renegade Awards.
>
> Miguel is one of the five people on the list of people on Wired 
> Magazine's "Wired Rave Awards", for the 'Renegade of Year' award. So 
> now you can vote for him here <http://www.raveawards.com> if you live 
> inside the USA. If you don't... well, try to work out something.
>
>
>       2. Meet the team. This week Sebastien Pouliot.
>
> 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.
>
> This week we have been talking to Sebastien Pouliot in the IRC. 
> Sebastien is the developer who has worked out most of the Cryptography 
> classes in Mono. Let's see what he told us (before the kids came back!).
>
>
>         Interview with Sebastien Pouliot
>
> *MWN: So, Sebastien, would you like to explain to the Mono Community 
> which are your interests in Mono?*
>
> *S.Pouliot:* I've been following mono evolution for the last year, 
> well soon after I started programming in C#, as I was looking for 
> people using the crypto classes.
>
> *MWN: And why did you took the System.Crypto namespace classes?. Are 
> you a security developer?*
>
> *S.Pouliot:* My work involves security. However we don't often get the 
> chance to code low-level stuff - like encryption algorithms. Those are 
> almost always available before stating a project. I'm a security 
> architect. I design security solution for products and some consulting 
> for Motus Technologies (http://www.motus.com).
>
> *MWN: Since you are the Cryptography expert in the Mono Team, what can 
> you say about the security design in .NET and the implementation Mono 
> is doing?.*
>
> *S.Pouliot:* The .NET design (both CLR and the class library) is a big 
> step toward a better security architecture. Just using managed code 
> should solve many of the current security issues (like stack overrun). 
> Mono is currently building features into it's class library. 
> Eventually we'll have to ensure that every access to ressource is 
> correctly protected. This will take some time but, being open-source, 
> I'm sure mono will get (at least) as secure as the Microsoft 
> implementation.
>
> *MWN: You have been in touch with a lot of the software in the Mono 
> source tree, which of the classes you have contributed to are the ones 
> you believe are more useful for the other developers?.*
>
> *S.Pouliot:* This is difficult to answer. Most people won't use any of 
> the security classes directly. X509 certificates and RSA are the 
> classes that may get used without the knowledge of the developpers 
> like in code signing, permissions... the base are already there but 
> more work is needed before we see them in action. Hopefully more and 
> more developers will start using higher-level classes, i.e. outside 
> Cryptography. It's so much easier to upgrade a SOAP web service to use 
> WS-Security than to build your own secure communication. I'm just 
> starting to look where are the crypto classes being used in the 
> framework. So far I've compiled a small list inside corlib. I expect 
> to find much more of them in other assembly. The hard part is getting 
> people with different expertises to work at a single issue the same 
> time - instead of iteratively. And this will be needed to complete the 
> most complex classes (like Xml Signature which mix XML and digital 
> signature).
>
> *MWN: Anything you'd like to say to the world?*
>
> *S.Pouliot:* One last thing. I was very lucky with people and I reused 
> their own sources into Mono (like Sergey's MiniParser, BouncyCastle's 
> asymmetric key generation, Chew Keong TAN's BigInteger class). Much of 
> my work wouldn't be apparent without all those donations. Many thanks 
> to them!
>
>
>       3. The Mono Spell.
>
> /I have much to learn about platanos :-)/. Alp Toker, our Platano guy.
>
>
>       4. CVS Activity.
>
> This has been a bussy week. Here are the results. (*) Actually I am 
> using the number of commits as measure, I will try to get more 
> accurate aproximations in the future. (Starting Dec 10th, till Dec 17th)
>
> Authors: Total 26
>
> *Author* *Commits*
> Alejandro Sanchez 5
> Daniel Morgan 12
> Dennis Hayes 1
> Dick Porter 4
> Duncan Mak 4
> Eduardo Garcia 2
> Gaurav Vaish 2
> Gonzalo Paniagua 48
> Jackson Harper 3
> Jaime Anguiano 7
> Jeroen Janssen 14
> Johannes Roith 1
> Jonathan Pryor 2
> Juli Mallett 10
> Marco Ridoni 11
> Martin Baulig 116
> Miguel de Icaza 38
> Mike Kestner 1
> Nick Drochak 3
> Rachel Hestilow 7
> Ravi Pratap 2
> Sebastien Pouliot 13
> Tim Haynes 3
> Ville Palo 17
> Zoltan Varga 3
>
> *Modules* *Commits*
> mono 50
> mono/jit 3
> mcs/mcs 12
> mcs/class 99
> mcs/class/corlib 28
> mcs/class/System.Web 19
> debugger 116
> Windows.Forms 3
> MonoLOGO 7
> gtk-sharp 19
> mbas 14
> monodoc 12
> mphoto 1
>
>
>       5. Mailing List Activity.
>
> Most of the mails were related to errors when installing and/or 
> running the new release of Mono. Finally new packages were released 
> and all those problems disappeared.
>
> 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 do the work".
>
> People have noticed that Mono is being monitored by lots of media. And 
> they have sent emails reflecting this. Here are some interesting 
> links: Wininformant 
> <http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=27580>,News.Com 
> <http://news.com.com/2100-1001-977080.html> and Zdnet 
> <http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-977080.html>.
>
> The C++ and CLR thread was also quite interesting. Someone was asking 
> if 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 Eiffel using different 
> mechanisms. The Mono team position is clear, remaining compatibility 
> with Microsoft CIL is more important than extending issues so people 
> are invited to do their reseach using the Mono platform and then 
> submitting the propose to ECMA for standarization, but that is not 
> going to be done from Mono (at least in a long time).
>
> Please visit us at the homepage of the Mono Project: 
> http://www.go-mono.org
>