[Mono-osx] Heads-up: new Mono bindings for OSX.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello folks,

     There was a discussion today about the status of CocoaSharp and
the other .NET bindings on IRC.    This is a discussion that we have
had for a while, what is the future of CocoaSharp, and what is the
future of Objective-C bindings and Mono:

http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-osx/2009-May/002240.html

      Back then, I wanted to promote a unified set of OSX bindings for
Mono, but nothing really came out of it.    The existing designs were
lacking in a few areas which we have discussed in the past, and
included problems in the binding design, problems with the usage
requirements, general FDG pattern problems and licensing.

      We addressed those problems with MonoTouch, our bindings to the
iPhone platform.   As part of that effort we gained some experience
with Cocoa bindings, with how we wanted to map the APIs and with how
to make documentation available to our users.   The last step was to
bring that design to OSX.

       In the last few weeks we have been working over our weekends to
bring the same design that we used for MonoTouch to OSX.   The design
is documented in various pages at http://monotouch.net with the core
design being documented here:
http://monotouch.net/Documentation/API_Design

      We are cleaning up the bindings and will release them shortly.
 The bindings will be MIT X11 licensed, initially will support only a
handful of libraries (AppKit, CoreFoundation, Foundation,
CoreGraphics) but will use the same MonoTouch tools to bind third
party libraries
(http://monotouch.net/Documentation/Binding_New_Objective-C_Types)
allowing developers to either contribute bindings or binding existing
Objective-C libraries directly.

Miguel.