code monkey

So it's been a long time since we've gotten any real snow here in Nashville. And even though one inch is barely a "real" snow, I rushed out to make the most of it. My inspiration: My masterpiece: Of course, I just bought a house, moved in, and have not met my neighbors yet. This may not be the best way to start off.

Recently, I was afraid I may get coerced into giving a Winforms presentation at the Mono Summit. So I took some stats on how Winforms has progressed since the last Mono Summit. I evaded a presentation (on Winforms at least), but I still have some stats that really needed to be made into a pretty graph showing our progress over the last year. Pretty much all that we are missing is WebBrowser DOM stuff and 2.0 DataBinding.

I generally don't make any announcement when I release a new MoMA for the new Mono release. This is because you just click the "Check for newer version" link, which magically downloads the new definition files and life is chock full of rainbows and ponies. However, for the 1.2.6 release, we made 2 important changes to the definition files that warrant a mention. - Removal of Design Namespaces - One of our awesome mono-vangelists pointed out that people scan their app (and third party controls) and see all kinds of warnings about things missing in the Design classes. However, these classes are not used to run apps, just for designers such as Visual Studio. So we are potentially scaring off users for no reason. Therefore, beginning with 1.2.6, we no longer include the Design namespaces in MoMA reports. (If you really want the Design stuffs, you can download the definition file that includes them on the MoMA home page .) - Addition of .Net 3.0/3.5 Classes - Beginning ...

By now, all blog aggregators have been inundated by Hack Week posts. I'll finish up the week by adding mine. :) I decided that part of my Hack Week would be to venture from my "happy place" of Winforms in Visual Studio and write something in GTK# using MonoDevelop. I chose to write a plugin for Banshee that allows it to sync with and display files generated by taking your iPod for a run with the Nike+ accessory. Oh, and using Moonlight, just because it seemed fashionable. I didn't get as far as I would have liked because I struggled alot with compiling and installing all the Moonlight prerequisites to the right places. I no doubt have several copies of mono, moon, olive, and cairo floating around on my SuSE box now. :) It should be a lot easier when Moonlight is a little more 'finished' and comes in a neat little package. But it was a great learning experience for things I didn't understand: prefixes, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PKG_CONFIG. Anyways, here...

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 ha...

This past week, I wrote up a pretty detailed guide on porting Winforms applications to run on Mono. I originally planned it for my blog, but decided it needed a more permanent home like the Mono wiki . So here it is: Winforms Porting Guide . If you use it and come across things that don't work or could be made clearer, please let me know. And of course if you have suggestions or questions on other things that could use some documentation, I'd love to hear them as well. The comment section on this post is probably the best place for feedback, but you can also send stuff to [monkey *at* jpobst *dot* com]. Happy Hacking!

It's been quite a while since we released Mono 1.2.3, and the winforms team and contributors have been busy. I often reference the MoMA reports for what areas I need to be working on. Since the MoMA reports haven't been updated to reflect things that have now been implemented since 1.2.3, I did some quick and dirty comparisons so I could filter out what's been done. According to my numbers, as of 1.2.3 there are 995 winforms methods that people have reported as in-use in their real world applications that we are missing. Since 1.2.3, we have implemented 335 of them, leaving us with 660 to go. I think that's pretty good progress for about 2 months. As the number gets smaller, it will probably take longer to implement things, as they are generally the harder ones left. Two of the biggest places we are missing stuff are WebBrowser and MaskedTextBox, which are the only 2 controls we are completely missing. WebBrowser accounts for 154 of the missing methods, and Maske...