[Mono-list] VBNC in Mono.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hey folks,

    So Rolf's new VB compiler can bootstrap itself on Windows, and is
able to build its own runtime on Windows as well (I mean, with .NET),
but on Linux we are running into a few bugs in Mono.

    I did a little bit of work to get it working, but before we try to
bootstrap vbcn with vbnc on Linux I tried to run the vbnc test suite and
we are running into many problems.

    Will try to work on some of those, but if folks feel interested in
helping out, here is what you can do:

	* Checkout "vbnc" module.

	* Copy the http://tirania.org/vbnc.exe executable into
	  vbnc/vbnc/bin directory, or alternatively use Visual
	  Studio to build your vb compiler using the vbnc solution

	* Copy the executable (if you are going to test on Linux)

	* Go to the vbnc/vbnc/bin directory, and try the following
	  scripts:

		sh test-module MODULE

	  Where MODULE is one of:

		1Declarations, CompileTime, CompileTime2, Mono, 
	  Resources, RunTime, SelfTest or VBRunTime

	* Some of the errors require modification of VBNC to track
	  down the bug, and the stack traces might not be very
	  useful because we do not have debugging symbols that we
	  can consume.

    Another area that could help would be to write a program that used
the COM API to consume a .pdb debugging file from .NET and convert it
into a .mdb that Mono can consume.

    Alternatively, I believe there might be tools to do .pdb to ecma
debugging, and then we would need an ECMA debugging to Mono debugging
translator.

Miguel.