[Mono-list] [Mono-announce-list] Mono and SourceGear's vault.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

    I am very happy to announce that Ximian and SourceGear have engaged
in a partnership to improve Mono.  You can read the official press
release here:

http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=sourcegear

    The Vault software from SourceGear is a fascinating project on its
own.  The Vault is a state-of-the-art source code control system
developed by Source Gear, and today targets the Windows development
space.  

    The Vault is an interesting success story of .NET, if you are
interedsted in the anthropology of software, I recomend reading Eric
Sink's weblog (Eric is the founder of SourceGear, known in the open
source world for launching the AbiWord project a few years ago).  His
weblog is here: http://biztech.ericsink.com/

    Basically they went from concept to product in record time using
.NET, and now with this agreement we will help them in record time to
make their software available on any platform supported by Mono.    The
software is built entirely with web service interfaces.
    
    The work we are doing falls in three categories:

	* Implementing the web services functionality in Mono.  This was 	 
pretty much non-existant before (thanks to Tim Coleman who did
	  the early work on it). 

	* Implement any missing pieces, and fix any bugs in the Mono
	  runtime that might stop the vault client software from
	  running properly.

	* Make the runtime rock-solid.

	  The regression tests that Mono will be subject to, last for up
	  to 24 hours running on a single instance of the virtual
	  machine, so this will stress quite a bit of the runtime
	  engine and opens the way for Mono's viability as a solid
	  platform for commercial applications. 

    All of the code developed will be licensed under the proper terms:
X11 for the class libraries;  and LGPL for the runtime.  

    Those who track the Mono patches list, might have noticed this
direction various weeks ago, when work on a new XmlSerializer was
implemented (the foundation for web services), the soap classes, work on
making the io-layer crash-proof and more scalable and getting a
completely new design and implementation for the Http client code.  

    Also, we told the Mono contributors in advance, and you might have
noticed that many Mono developers have been helping fixing bugs,
improving the test suites and auditing the code for robustness
purposes.  We are also very busy with these new tasks, so we appreciate
the help of everyone on the #mono channel that has been helping newbies
while we have been busy with this.  Thanks to everyone that has been
helping so far!

    You have no idea how exciting this is.  I could not wait to tell the
Mono community about this.

    This is going to help not only SourceGear ship their product with
little or no modifications to Linux and Mac developers, but it will help
everyone who is looking at Mono as a professional grade cross-platform
solution.

    It is nice to be able to run web services code off-the-shelf with
Mono now.  Like using the Google API straight out of the box.  And
thanks to Erik Lebel and Atsushi Eno a WSDL compiler is also in the
way.  Although not required by SourceGear, it is a great addition to the
Mono SDK.

    This is the tip of the iceberg:  For those not tracking cvs on a
daily basis, you should know that work on System.Windows.Forms has
picked up a lot of steam thanks to OpenLink's contribution to the
WineLib effort.  This effort lead by Alexandre and Aleksey now also
features a pluggable backend architecture for the System.Drawing
namespace, and we have a nice Xr driver (the all-singing, all-dancing
new rendering API: http://xr.xwin.org/).

Miguel.
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