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Mono Weekly News, December 16th, 2002

By

[ Thanks to Jaime Anguiano
Olarra for this link. ]

Welcome to the second MWN letter. As the year is ending, it’s
time to look back and see what the Mono people had been doing. We
also start a new section, “Meet the team”.

Table of contents

  • 1. Headlines.
    • 1.1 Mono Commercial uses.
    • 1.2 Mono’s ASP.NET does 1% of the market in one
      week!
    • 1.3 More changes to MonoBasic.
    • 1.4 Transactions available in System.Data with
      Xml.
    • 1.5 Multiple threads support in the
      debugger.
    • 1.6 Reflection.Emit can be used in Run
      mode.
    • 1.7 More work in the NUnit 2 integration.
    • 1.8 Lots of improvements in ASP.NET.
    • 1.9 Mono Annual Report.
    • 1.10 Platano’s out and GNOME# for Debian
      too!
    • 1.11 Miguel and Mono in Business2.com.
    • 1.12 Miguel for the Renegade Awards.
  • 2. Meet the team. This week Sebastien
    Pouliot.
  • 3. CVS Activity.
  • 4. Mailing List Activity.

1.1 Mono Commercial uses.

Tipic today
announced their work on porting their Instant Messaging Server
platform to run on Mono. Winfessor also announced the availability
of their Jabber SDK to run on Mono.eAlso two weeks ago we mentioned
OpenLink Software’s

announcement of their product, also using Mono.

1.2 Mono’s ASP.NET does 1% of the market in one week!

Netcraft has published
this survey where you
can read the following statement: “around 1% of internet sites
using ASP.Net are Linux based, but it is early days both for the
Mono project and for .Net itself, and both will be hoping to grow
very significantly from current levels.” If you want to read more
on this, follow this link.

1.3 More changes to MonoBasic.

Marco has been working a lot in the MonoBasic implementation and
now the Try/Catch/Finally statements work, statically declared
events work, For/Next/Step also work and properties work too!

1.4 Transactions available in System.Data with Xml.

Ville has done some coding on XmlDataDocument. XmlDataDocument
is the class which “communicates” with DataSet, so these
“transactions” means updating, deleting, and adding DataRows and
Datacolumns to DataSet.

1.5 Multiple threads support in the debugger.

The debugger is now getting multi-thread debugging support.
Details: a global thread lock mechanism has been added, a new
command line interface is there for everybody to use. Getting
registers is working again. The ScriptingContext now supports a
synchronous (for the command-line interpreter) and an asynchronous
(for the gui) interface. BackTraceView is working. The handling of
synchronous commands was improved.

1.6 Reflection.Emit can be used in Run mode.

Zoltan Varga has contributed the support for running code
generated by Reflection.Emit. This means Reflection.Emit now
support ‘Run’ mode and not only ‘Save’ mode as before. This allows
us to generate code on the fly and hand it over to the JIT. Now we
will be able to JIT compiler our regular expression patterns like
MS implementation does.

1.7 More work in NUnit 2 integration.

A lot of test suites were added, as the ones for Publisher and
PublisherMembershipCondition, for DataSet, Xml-tests, for
StrongName, and StrongNamePublicKeyBlob.

1.8 Lots of improvements in ASP.NET.

Gonzalo has revised the C# generator that is much efficient than
before, the user controls’ automatic events are activated now
properly. His work has made possible to load .ascx controls per
program, to get datalist fixed and now all the test are working,
the @Page, @Application and @Control are now available and he has
started the authentification support using Forms. He has also fixed
a coupple of validators and got the kernel32.dll not found warning
out!

1.9 Mono Annual Report.

No doubt, this has been the year where Mono has proved to be a
serious project that is accomplishing the heraldic task of building
an opensource implementation of .NET that will be available for
everybody. After twelve months of development it’s time to look
back and see the what we have been doing. Here you
can find a little resume with some OpenCalc charts.

1.10 Platano’s out and GNOME# for Debian too!

Alp Toker has released Platano, the very first Mono
based media player. He has also packaged GNOME# capable packages,
the deb urls are these:

  • deb http://www.debianplanet.org/mono unstable main
  • deb-src http://www.debianplanet.org/mono unstable main

1.11 Miguel and Mono in Business2.com.

Business2.com has published a very nice article about Miguel and
Mono, you can read it here.
If you get the magazine in print you can see a penguin and Miguel
wearing a suit!

1.12 Miguel for the Renegade Awards.

Miguel is one of the five people on the list of people on Wired
Magazine’s “Wired Rave Awards”, for the ‘Renegade of Year’ award.
So now you can vote for him here if you live inside the USA. If
you don’t… well, try to work out something.

2. Meet the team. This week Sebastien Pouliot.

The Mono team is integrated by contributors all over the world that
are working really hard to get this project going further. In this
section we will be meeting this people so we can know more about
them and what they are doing.

This week we have been talking to Sebastien Pouliot in the IRC.
Sebastien is the developer who has worked out most of the
Cryptography classes in Mono. Let’s see what he told us (before the
kids came back!).

Interview with Sebastien Pouliot

MWN: So, Sebastien, would you like to explain to the
Mono Community which are your interests in Mono?

S.Pouliot: I’ve been following mono evolution
for the last year, well soon after I started programming in C#, as
I was looking for people using the crypto classes.

MWN: And why did you took the System.Crypto namespace
classes? Are you a security developer?

S.Pouliot: My work involves security. However
we don’t often get the chance to code low-level stuff – like
encryption algorithms. Those are almost always available before
stating a project. I’m a security architect. I design security
solution for products and some consulting for Motus Technologies
(http://www.motus.com).

MWN: Since you are the Cryptography expert in the Mono
Team, what can you say about the security design in .NET and the
implementation Mono is doing?

S.Pouliot: The .NET design (both CLR and the
class library) is a big step toward a better security architecture.
Just using managed code should solve many of the current security
issues (like stack overrun). Mono is currently building features
into it’s class library. Eventually we’ll have to ensure that every
access to ressource is correctly protected. This will take some
time but, being open-source, I’m sure mono will get (at least) as
secure as the Microsoft implementation.

MWN: You have been in touch with a lot of the software
in the Mono source tree, which of the classes you have contributed
to are the ones you believe are more useful for the other
developers?

S.Pouliot: This is difficult to answer. Most
people won’t use any of the security classes directly. X509
certificates and RSA are the classes that may get used without the
knowledge of the developpers like in code signing, permissions…
the base are already there but more work is needed before we see
them in action. Hopefully more and more developers will start using
higher-level classes, i.e. outside Cryptography. It’s so much
easier to upgrade a SOAP web service to use WS-Security than to
build your own secure communication. I’m just starting to look
where are the crypto classes being used in the framework. So far
I’ve compiled a small list inside corlib. I expect to find much
more of them in other assembly. The hard part is getting people
with different expertises to work at a single issue the same time –
instead of iteratively. And this will be needed to complete the
most complex classes (like Xml Signature which mix XML and digital
signature).

MWN: Anything you’d like to say to the
world?

S.Pouliot: One last thing. I was very lucky
with people and I reused their own sources into Mono (like Sergey’s
MiniParser, BouncyCastle’s asymmetric key generation, Chew Keong
TAN’s BigInteger class). Much of my work wouldn’t be apparent
without all those donations. Many thanks to them!

3. CVS Activity.

This has been a bussy week. Here are the results. (*) Actually I
am using the number of commits as measure, I will try to get more
accurate aproximations in the future. (Starting Dec 10th, till Dec
17th)

Authors: Total 26

Author Commits
Alejandro Sanchez 5
Daniel Morgan 12
Dennis Hayes 1
Dick Porter 4
Duncan Mak 4
Eduardo Garcia 2
Gaurav Vaish 2
Gonzalo Paniagua 48
Jackson Harper 3
Jaime Anguiano 7
Jeroen Janssen 14
Johannes Roith 1
Jonathan Pryor 2
Juli Mallett 10
Marco Ridoni 11
Martin Baulig 116
Miguel de Icaza 38
Mike Kestner 1
Nick Drochak 3
Rachel Hestilow 7
Ravi Pratap 2
Sebastien Pouliot 13
Tim Haynes 3
Ville Palo 17
Zoltan Varga 3
Modules Commits
mono 50
mono/jit 3
mcs/mcs 12
mcs/class 99
mcs/class/corlib 28
mcs/class/System.Web 19
debugger 116
Windows.Forms 3
MonoLOGO 7
gtk-sharp 19
mbas 14
monodoc 12
mphoto 1

4. Mailing List Activity.

Most of the mails were related to errors when installing and/or
running the new release of Mono. Finally new packages were released
and all those problems disappeared.

There was some discussion about why is Nant being used instead
of make, the answer is simple: “Sean thought it was better than
make and volunteered to do the work”.

People have noticed that Mono is being monitored by lots of
media. And they have sent emails reflecting this. Here are some
interesting links: Wininformant,
News.Com
and Zdnet.

The C++ and CLR thread was also quite interesting. Someone was
asking if CIL and Mono support the multiple inheritance and related
questions. The fact is the CIL doesn’t need to be modified,
multiple-inheritance is supported by C++ and Eiffel using different
mechanisms. The Mono team position is clear, remaining
compatibility with Microsoft CIL is more important than extending
issues so people are invited to do their reseach using the Mono
platform and then submitting the propose to ECMA for
standarization, but that is not going to be done from Mono (at
least in a long time).

Please visit us at the homepage of the Mono Project: http://www.go-mono.org

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