[Mono-list] Thanks for Mono 1.0

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello fellow hackers,

    Well, we finally shipped Mono 1.0.   And I wanted to thank everyone
that contributed to the project.   We have listed 234 contributors on
the release notes, and we know that we did not capture all of the people
that contributed with bug reports, or that promoted Mono, or that taught
courses and did speeches on Mono, but we still wanted to thank you all.

    I think am going to go to history as the worst estimator of times.  
First we predicted that Evolution would take six months to develop, and
it in the end it took two and a half years.   Mono was estimated at a
year, and we almost got it done in time, but we kept adding features, so
in the end the project stretched to three years.

    Am not sure there is a morale to that story.

    Anyways, Mono 1.2 is currently underway as we have branched the CVS
tree.  Now that we have got our basic platform out, we will not wait for
such extended periods of time to ship stable versions.  We are still
debating the details of what we want to ship and when.

    Mono was a community effort like I have never witnessed myself.  It
feels like we got more "core" developers than Linux 1.0 did.  The
projects are different in nature and the world is more connected today,
but it seems that by that metric, Mono was a fairly large project.  

   And this would not be possible without the dedicated developers at
the community and in the Mono team that would spend their working days
and their every weekend making sure things worked.   We also got a big
push from SourceGear in the early days of Ximian the startup company
which allowed our web services stack and XmlSerializer to exist, in my
view, it marked the beginning of Mono as a solid platform when we had to
pass their regression test suites.

   Now that we got Mono 1.0 out the door, we plan on doing two fairly
fun activities (once all the beer drinking is over):

	* ASP.NET 2 (twice as big!)

	* XML 2 (XQuery and the new serializer are the big ones here)

	* Gtk# upgrade.

	* WSE 2/Indigo (if there is enough demand to build these).

	* The C# 2.1 compiler.

	* From the 1.0 profile: Windows.Forms and mbas compiler did not
	  ship, and we are going to spend some more quality time on them
	  now.

	* CAS will hopefully debut in 1.2

   We are still wondering what should the Novell team focus on, and what
are the areas that external contributors can assist with.   There is a
lot of work that needs to be done.

Miguel.