Mono 2.0 is out!

Posted on October 6th, 2008 in Mono and .NET | Comments

Homepage image

Homepage image

This is a huge milestone. A lot of work went into getting this release out.

With it comes C# 3.0, Linq, VB.NET 8.0, System.Windows.Forms 2.0, and so much more!!

Also checkout the redesigned Mono homepage (eating our own dog food on the backend as it runs Mono).

Subversion, MSDN, Mozilla+MWF

Posted on May 9th, 2006 in Personal | Comments

Subversion

Subversion is finally putting the last nail in the CVS coffin it seems. All but GNOME and Mozilla’s CVS are the only two of the most mainstream active projects I know that still stuck using CVS. I can’t figure out why GNOME hasn’t switched yet, but I know its going to be a bit of trouble for Mozilla with the make scripts, lxr, and anonymous mirrors.

Also the ViewCVS project has now been renamed now to ViewVC as of 1.0, and has taken up residence on tigris.org with SVN itself.

Bye Bye MSDN

After having an MSDN subscription on hand for over 10 years, my MSDN sub. is now gone, expired, and dead. I just couldn’t figure out why I needed it anymore. I’m sure I will come to a point where I will need it again, and I might buy a new one in the future. So far I’ve done just fine without it for over 4 1/2 months without it.

Maybe, I might buy another next year… blah… maybe

Mozilla control for MWF

No more compile errors from Mozilla’s headers! Whoohooo. Still lots more work to do. I have to thank the Epiphany guys and the Galeon guys a ton for their help.

Seems I have to directly break some of the documented rules with Mozilla’s embedding API because some of the headers in Mozilla don’t follow them either in some of their unfrozen APIs. From what I gather from everyone though, it’s not that bad calling the unfrozen interfaces in there. Usually requires a few nights of hacking after every major release of Firefox/Mozilla to keep everything working and I don’t mind doing that. Not like we are going to be doing anything that special (hope those aren’t famous last words). I’ve got Firefox 1.5/Seamonkey/XULRunner support right now and I’m nearly there for supporting backword compatablity with Firefox 1.0/Mozilla 1.7.

I was going to go crazy on features since its so easy to tie in anything in there, but I don’t know which part will get rewriten in the next Mozilla based incarnation to be released. I used gtkembedmoz as the main basis for about 50% of my code, so I already support just everything it offers already. I’ve also added support for getting more information from the click and key press events, and I’ve added the ability to disable a few features that you might not want (frames, plugins, images, meta-redirects, etc). I even added support for forcing a repaints, and accessing and consuming a lot of events like before a URL change or on any click or keypress that happens.

However, currently, I’m debating on adding:
* Print/Print Preview support
* Access to the clipboard and the selected text in the window from code
* Access to cookies, history, cache, etc.
* Access to Mozilla’s configuration settings (for reseting the default font’s, text size, etc)
* Access to evaluate Javascript (even get a boolean return code) in the page and get even catch Javascript error callbacks (Galeon does this).
* More networking control (proxy, file handlers, etc).
* DOM integration - will have to be with the XPCOM bridge (unless someone wants to wrap the huge root nsIDOMElement class, the root of all elements, in C for me :-P)

All these features, with the exception of the DOM access, is very easy to add, however the more I add, the more any change in Mozilla’s codebase in the future could make it easier to break.

I think I’m going to play it by ear when wrapping the WebBrowser API in MWF to see where I get too.

Mono in the press.

Posted on April 29th, 2006 in Personal | Comments

Mono is pretty big and gets tons of press attention all the time. Nothing to special at this month, but I though I might link a few articles that caught my eye.

Article on Linux.com talks the ease of Mono and the ability to recycle your .Net programming force.

Article on Goverment Computer News talks about Mono on Novell Linux Desktop.

Article on Mono in The .NET Developers Journal about the history of Mono in light of Mono’s up comming 5 year anniversary.