[Monodevelop-devel] Error when installing Language Binding from custom repository

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Tomas Petricek
<tomas.petricek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been working on an F# Language Binding for MonoDevelop and I'm
> trying to create a repository, so that people can install it using the
> standard tools. There are still some bugs in the Language Binding, but
> when I just copy the DLL to the "BackendBindings" directory in
> MonoDevelop folder, then it seems to work okay (it requires F# and F#
> PowerPack in order to run). My testing repository is here:
> http://www.tomasp.net/monodevelop/
>
> The installation from the repository seems to work fine on Linux/Mono.
> The installation reports some errors with the configuration and some
> exception occurs when it loads (I guess), but that looks like my bugs
> that I can fix (still, it installs and you can create new projects and
> everything)

Nice!

> However, I'm having more troubles on Windows/.NET (I'm testing it on a
> clean Windows 7 machine with Gtk# and MonoDevelop installed using the
> instructions from the web). When I go through the addin installation
> procedure, it installs the adding and just before showing the final
> dialog window (with success message and warnings), it shows an
> "Unhandled Exception." dialog with the following:
>
<snip>
>
> I tried attaching to the process from VS debugger and it doesn't seem
> to even load my "FSharpBinding.dll" assembly, so I'm wondering if this
> could some issue in MonoDevelop itself? I tried creating a trivial
> language binding in C# and that worked okay, but I was able to
> reproduce the error with the repository above on two different
> machines. I can also send you the generated log file from the
> installation if you need more information.
>
> I wasn't quite able to figure out what is going on (I think the
> exception actually comes from Mono.Addins and I think I've seen errors
> like this when accidentally accessing GUI stuff from a background
> thread, but I'm not sure if that could be a problem here). Anyway,
> this will be probably quite easy to find out for somebody who has
> properly setup environment with debug builds of all relevant
> libraries.

Lluis will need to look at that; it sounds like an issue in
Mono.Addins. I've cc'd him.

> Thanks for your help!
> Tomas Petricek
>
> PS: I think that the Visual Studio projects in monodevelop-2.4 "tag"
> (I used that version to make sure my adding works with latest stable
> version) incorrectly reference 4.0.0 versions of Mono.Addins etc. (see
> for example http://github.com/mono/monodevelop/blob/monodevelop-2.4/main/src/core/MonoDevelop.Ide/MonoDevelop.Ide.csproj).
> I tried changed that to 5.0.0 on my machine, but it didn't resolve the
> issue I was having.

There should be a GAC policy to make Mono.Addins 0.5 used for 0.4
references, so it shouldn't be an issue.

BTW, we have a public addin build server at
http://addins.monodevelop.com/ that can build and publish open-source
addins against specific MonoDevelop versions...

> PS2: I noticed there was a project with the aim to implement F#
> support for MonoDevelop at the GSOC this year, but I couldn't find any
> outcomes of the project. Is that available somewhere? I tried
> contacting the person who worked on that, but with no luck (possibly,
> I just got a wrong email). Anyway, I could probably contribute my work
> to that project (or the other way round) to avoid duplication of
> efforts...

You can find it here -
http://code.google.com/p/mono-soc-2010/source/browse/#svn/trunk/FSharpBinding.
The project wasn't completed successfully, and I'm not sure of the
current state of the addin. It was derived from an earlier effort by
Vasili I. Galchin at http://github.com/vasili/FSharpBinding.

There was also an older addin at
http://code.google.com/p/wildart/wiki/FSharpBinding but we recommended
people not to use it because it was derived from old MD/#D GPL code,
which would not permit use of MS-PL code and libraries.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com