mono

I've finished the last few bits of my summer of code project. Client and Server side authentication to CUPS using Kerberos both work now, and this works for both the administration tools and IPP. It's been fun working on CUPS and now that I'm a bit more familiar with the code, I'd like to have a try at implementing SPNEGO and NTLMSSP support as well. This should be much easier now, as I already implemented support for WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate for my SoC project.

Rolf Kvinge also seems to've been successful, Mono now has a self-hosting Visual Basic.NET compiler. I'm looking forward to trying it out, once I can get my hands on a binary to compile it with...

Using native functions from .NET is much easier then I expected. I managed to wrap libftdi in a little over an hour. Doing something similar in a scripting language or using something like SWIG is definetely much harder. The code is here.

Mono has a good resource on wrapping native libraries using P/Invoke.

My new nunit packages just got accepted by ftp-master. The CLI Policy has been updated.

In the mean while, I've continued work on the 'svn' plugin for bzr. The refactored bzr API is working great for foreign branch implementation. The only two things that are odd so far are the fact that I have to implement a phony 'Transport' subclass and I think the name of 'BzrDir' should be changed, though I'm not sure to what.

I'm back doing Mono Basic development. So far I've only been adding tests that demonstrate bugs I've encountered in mbas, but I'll be working on fixing some of the tests that currently fail next week.

Meanwhile, nunit 2.2.7 has been released. It fixes the only bug that has been reported in the Debian BTS so far. We've also hit some ABI/API issues as there appear to have been changes even between point releases.

Looks like RedHat is finally going to include Mono in Fedora Core (and in Enterprise Server later on, presumably). They have been holding it off so far, but it looks like they turned around because of the amount of high-quality apps written for GNOME in .NET. Their original reason for not including mono is still a big question for me. All I've heard so far is that they were holding off the boat because of 'patent danger' and ``we're already betting on Java anyway''. Especially that first argument doesn't seem to make any sense in relation to GNOME software given the fact that .NET is ECMA-standardised.

My second Debian package, NDoc, has just been accepted by ftp-master. I also signed up as new maintainer, advocated by dajobe (who also sponsored ndoc). I wonder how long the whole process is going to take, but the statistics on the nm site don't give much hope. At the moment, I'm still waiting for an application manager.

So, I finally got the first few patches for mbas working. The amount of changes I had to make was small, but it took some time to get familiar with the code. Thanks to Rafael, Alexandre and Maverson for their comments.

Two more left to fix...

Fixing that mbas bug I was encountering isn't as easy as I hoped it would be. In the mean time, I got annoyed by the fact that mb-parser.jay isn't syntax-highlighted in vim. It is written in `jay', a language similar to yacc, but for C# rather then for C.

So I threw together a vim script with syntax highlighting for jay.

Since I program with .NET at work (both in C# and VB.NET), I occasionally try to compile and run my applications using mono every now and then. Mono has come a long way. The C# compiler is very much complete, as far as I can tell, and so are most of the core assemblies. The only two things that are still incomplete when I try to use them are System.Windows.Forms and the Mono Visual Basic.NET compiler.

The Basic compiler (mbas) mostly has problems parsing constructions that are allowed in Visual Basic.NET. I've been looking at fixing these issues myself over the last few days and hope to have a patch in the next few days.

My first package (nunit) is now in the Debian archive. It was approved by ftp-master two days ago.

Thanks go to Andrew "ajmitch" Mitchell for sponsoring and to Mirco "meebey" Bauer and Dave "Dajobe" Beckett for comments and feedback. See the pkg-mono pages for details.

Meebey has uploaded another package (gnunit) that provides a Gtk# interface to NUnit.

I'm currently fixing the last few quirks in my NUnit Debian packages, after getting a some good feedback from the folks at #debian-mono. Just a few more hours before I'll put into pkg-mono's SVN. Until then, snapshots are available at:

deb ftp://autobuild.vernstok.nl/pub/releases/nunit/debian ./
deb-src ftp://autobuild.vernstok.nl/pub/releases/nunit/debian ./

I wonder what I'll work on next. Perhaps nantcontrib or ndoc?

Now that I'm doing development using .NET at work, I was starting to wonder whether I could use Mono on Linux for development rather then Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows.

Most of the things I'll need appear to be packaged already, thanks to the folks of the Debian Mono team. I just filed my first ITP for Debian for one of the other packages I need, nunit.

I hope to be packaging the other packages I use that are not in Debian yet soon. They are: nantcontrib, nunitcontrib and ndoc.