My First Year of Mono

A year ago today I made my first contribution to Mono. I was in a very interesting work situation. I was being paid to work on a project that didn't really exist, so basically I sat in my home office and did absolutely nothing except be ready should I get a phone call or email. This of course led to extreme boredom, not having anything to do but yet unable to leave the house. So I decided I better find something to keep my sanity.

I had watched the Mono project for years with interest, and decided that there were some easy things in Winforms 2.0 that I could implement to help out and as a way for me to learn C#. So a year ago today I submitted a zip file of 57 new 2.0 enumerations. From there I moved to new EventHandlers and EventArgs. Next came the VisualStyles namespace, then FlowLayoutPanel, SplitContainer, TableLayoutPanel, and finally the network of *Strip controls. I also deviated a bit to make a little app called MoMA.

I hadn't taken any vacation last year and had never been to Boston, so on a whim I went to the Mono Summit to hang out with a bunch of people I had never met. There I got to put some faces with names and make some contacts that would land me a full time Mono job with Novell when my company decided it could offshore my sitting around.

Since then it's been finishing up *Strip stuff, implementing all kinds of random Winforms goodness, and fixing bugs. I think it's been a great year, and I can't wait to see what year two brings!

Also, I want to thank those who took a chance on some random guy who showed up in #mono-winforms and didn't really know much about Mono, but wanted to help. Thanks pdb, jchambers, toshok, jackson, spouliot, mkestner, and miguel for your patience and your guidance!

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