[Mono-list] Mono 0.16 has been released!

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello everyone!

    The latest and greatest release of Mono is available now.  We have
easy-to-compile source code, RPMs for five distributions and even a Red
Carpet channel for those distributions if you want to play with it.

    Get the goodies here:

	http://www.go-mono.com/download.html

    I know the excitement is big, because everyone trying to compile
from CVS has been doing it because you needed some of the bug fixes, so
the bug fixes are here, now we can all share the joy and excitement of
those CVS head people!

    Thanks a lot again to Duncan for putting together the release notes,
and this time he was in charge of building all of the packages for your
delight.

    Thanks to everyone that make this possible.

    Release notes follow.

	Version 0.16 of Mono has been released!  This is mostly a bug
	fix release, a lot of work has been going on to make existing
	features more robust and less buggy.   Also, contributions are
	too varied, so it is hard to classify them in groups.

* Stats

        795 commits to mono and mcs since August 23rd.

* News

        The changes that got in this releases are mostly
        bugfixes.  Miguel, Martin and Ravi attacked lots of bugs in the
        compiler, Dick fixed a bunch of bugs related to processes and
        threads.  Mark Crichton resumed his work on the SPARC port and
        made lots of progress there.  Juli Mallett has been working on
        making sure Mono also builds on BSD systems.  As usual, Dietmar
        and Paolo supplied their continuous stream of fixes to the
        runtime.

        Dietmar has completed the work on the runtime side for
        remoting support and we ship now with a sample channel, the
        System.Runtime.Remoting.Sample.  This can be used as a
        reference implementation for anyone interested in implementing
        other channels (like a CORBA channel).  

	Duncan got preliminary XSLT support done by using
        libxslt.  

	Gonzalo (with some help from Patrik) has been working hard
        making our ASP.NET implementation work on both Mono and MS by
        migrating the existing xsp code to the class library.  Gaurav
        started working on the classes in System.Design.dll and Chris
        Toshok checked in Mono.Directory.LDAP, which will be the
        foundation to implement the System.DirectoryServices assembly.

        Various fixes from Kral, Jason, Piers and Gonzalo were
	committed to System.Xml; Martin Algiers reports that the
	upcoming NAnt release will be fully compatible with Mono.

        Miguel imported Sergey Chaban's Mono.PEToolkit and ilasm code
        to CVS.  Nick, as always, continues to refine our testing
        framework by improving our tests.  Andrew Birkett continues to
        improve the implementation of our security/cryptographic
        classes.  Jonathan Pryor contributed type-reflector the our
        list of tools.

* Other News From Behind de Curtain.

	While the above is pretty impressive on its own, various other
	non-released portions of Mono have been undergoing: Adam Treat
	has been leading the effort to document our class libraries
	and produce the tools required for it.

	Martin Baulig has been working on the Mono Debugger which is
	not being released yet.  This debugger allows both native
	Linux application as well as CIL applications to be debugged
	at the same time (and in fact, you can use this to debug the
	JIT engine).  The debugger is written in C# with some C glue

	In the meant A new JIT engine is under development, focused on
	adding more of the high-end optimizations which will be
	integrated on an ahead-of-time-compiler.   Dietmar and Paolo
	have been working on this.

* Contributors to this release

      * Non-Ximian developers: Adam Treat, Andrew Birkett, Dennis
        Hayes, Diego Sevilla, Franklin Wise, Gaurav Vaish ,Jason
        Diamond, Johannes Roith, John Sohn, Jonathan Pryor, Juli
        Mallett, Kral Ferch, Mike Crichton, Nick Drochak, Nick
        Zigarovich, Piers Haken, Rafael Teixeira, Ricardo Fernandez
        Pascual, Sergey Chaban, Tim Coleman.

      * Ximian developers: Dietmar, Paolo, Dick, Duncan, Ravi,
        Miguel, Martin, Chris, Joe, Gonzalo, Rodrigo.