Better Than a Mattress Sale

jackson had a good idea for today, and I thought I'd copy it. Since it's a holiday, I hacked on something other than Mono today. Before I worked on Mono, my open source community of choice was Jabber (fun fact: I did that webpage as well). Back then, I released a Jabber server written in VB.Net. One thing that I have laying around that I've never released is an XMPP client. Since it's written in VB.Net and uses the ToolStrip and MenuStrip controls, I figured I'd try to port it to Mono as another test case for the *Strip stuff.

I initially thought our VB runtime was missing too much and started rewriting it in C#. As I realized how much code there was, I decided that wasn't going to work. All of my logic and custom control libraries worked in VB, so I ended up leaving them as is. The main form was where most of the VB compiler magic ("My" classes) was creating problems, so I rewrote it in C# and used the other libraries as is.

After a day of hacking, I got something that I can at least make a screenshot out of:
I don't really know if I'll put any more time into it. Although I still find the project interesting, there's plenty to be done on Winforms 2.0 first.

Also, as the screenshot shows, I am currently running Vista. The plan was to dual-boot to see if I was ready to move. Vista had other intentions. It ate my XP partition. I didn't lose any data, but I don't have an XP partition I can successfully boot into anymore. I guess I'll use Vista this week, and determine which OS to reinstall cleanly this weekend. On the plus side, I didn't find any issues running Mono. :)

Comments

knocte said…
Why not using a VB->C# translator?

BTW, it would be nice to help this project become the new "Gaim": Galaxium.

It's written in C#, using Gtk# and has for the moment only MSN support. Do you know a good XMPP Mono library for writing a Jabber client?
February 20, 2007 at 1:44 AM
knocte said…
I meant, for adding Jabber support to Galaxium, not a new client like yours (which BTW is very interesting though).
February 20, 2007 at 4:04 AM
Jonathan Pobst said…
Check out jabber-net . It's not written specifically for Mono, but it seemed to work well in my (limited) tests. The only thing I ran into was it didn't do StartTls encryption due to something not being implemented yet in Mono, so I ran without encryption for this.
February 20, 2007 at 8:46 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introducing Pinta

Image
Over the holiday break, I stumbled upon this article from OSNews stating that there was a need for something like Paint.NET for Gtk. Having some experience with porting Paint.NET to Mono Winforms before, I knew that that was a massive task. But it still got me curious about Cairo and creating a layered canvas, since I had never played with Cairo or Gtk. After playing around for a few hours, I actually had a working paintbrush and canvas. Intrigued by my success, I played around with it for a few more days. By the end of the week I had a nifty little paint program with a few features. Now, a month later, it's time to open my little project up to the world: Pinta . Pinta is a clone of Paint.NET. It already has a small, but hopefully useful, set of features like multiple layers and infinite levels of Undo/Redo. I hope to implement the same feature set as Paint.NET. Currently there are several tools missing, as well as adjustments like brightness/contrast and levels and Pain...
Read more

Mono in Visual Studio 2010

Image
One cool new feature in Visual Studio 2010 is enhanced Multi Targeting . Presumably, its all about allowing developers to target both the 2.0 and 4.0 runtimes from VS2010, but what it really means is you can easily target Mono from within Visual Studio 2010. Like this: To enable this, you need to unzip this file to: C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v3.5\Profile Once you do that, you can take your .NET project: Go to project properties and switch it to the Mono 2.4 Profile: Now it will compile using Mono's assemblies, and will flag methods that Mono does not contain, like thus: This also works for Intellisense: And Object Browser: We are very excited about this feature, which should make it easy for people to ensure they are staying compatible with the Mono subset of the .NET framework without leaving Visual Studio. Once VS2010 is released, we will hopefully release the profile packs as we release each Mono version!
Read more

I don't get KDE

Image
Last night while browsing the internets, I saw some screenshots of KDE 4.3 running on openSUSE 11.2. I've never tried KDE, so I installed the openSUSE 11.2 M8 build to briefly play with it. What got me interested was this element of the KDE desktop: I look at that and see hope. It is elegant and refined. It is glassy and tasteful. It says: "I can easily compete with Windows 7 and OSX." Simply put, it is beautiful. Yes, there are some problems with it. The buttons do not highlight in any way on hover. There are no tooltips, so I don't even know what the top two buttons do. From what I can tell, they do absolutely nothing. But it really lives up to KDE's reputation of eye candy. And then you open a window: It is.. gray. There is no glass. There are no gradients. There is no depth. There is no elegance. There is just gray. It says: "I am kicking Windows 95's ass! Barely!" I just don't get it. How can half of your desktop (let's ...
Read more