Mono Project News

Moonlight 0.7 released

We have just released Moonlight 0.7 to the public.

Get your copy here.

This new version of Moonlight works on both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 and sports some significant changes from 0.6:

• Webkit loads the plugin (kangaroo, lewing)
• The stream/downloader/request/response logic (used for downloading media) has been been almost entirely moved from the browser bridges into libmoon, with the browsers providing subclasses. (kangaroo, sde)
• Finally add argument checking to all wrapped plugin objects (fejj).
• Windowless mode fixes (lewing, toshok)
• Plugin event handling fixes (lewing)

Engine

• Many clock/animation framework fixes. We now pass both animation matrix tests, and many, *many* other bugs (and regressions) have been fixed. (mdk).
• Bug fixes in the Stroke{Collection}.HitTest and Stroke{Collection}.Bounds code (toshok, sde).
• Namescope merging fixes (sde, jackson)
• Parser fixes, and changes paving the way for 2.0 work (jackson)
• Fix mouse event bubbling behavior (toshok)

Media

• Big, big strides in our media framework and the various (file, http, mms) downloaders, (fejj, rolf, kangaroo, fer)
• MMS stream selection (kangaroo)

Performance

• Shape caching and bounds computation reduction (spouliot)
• Geometry bounds work (spouliot)
• Fast path for position updates (Canvas.Left/Canvas.Top) (toshok)
• Improved temporary cairo surface bounds (lewing)
• Glyph rendering speedups (fejj)
• Resort by ZIndex as a dirty pass (toshok)

Silverlight 2.0

• work is progressing. A very simple 2.0 application successfully ran. (miguel, jackson, sde).

Forums added to Mono Website

Web-based forums for Mono discussions have been added at http://www.go-mono.com/forums

Most active Mono community members participate in on-line discussions through our mailing lists; however, many Mono users have expressed a preference for web forums based discussions.

In order to address this demand for an official forums for Mono, while keeping the community engaged in our mailing lists, we have embedded nabble.com into our site to create a bridge between the two groups. So, you can now use whichever method you prefer participate in the community.

First Moonlight Source Code Release

To encourage users to try out Moonlight, we are doing a source-code only release of Moonlight for developers to try out Moonlight.

To try out Moonlight, you have two options:

• Media codecs: you must do your own build from source code.
• No-media codecs: we provide one-click addins for Firefox that will install with no effort.

Firefox addins are available from http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight.

Source code for Moonlight is available from here. To compile Moonlight from source code follow these instructions.

Mono 1.9.1 has been released

We have done a minor release of Mono 1.9, Mono 1.9.1 that contains various bug fixes. Please see the release notes for details.

Mono 1.9.1 is available from our downloads page.

Packaged .NET Software for Linux

As part of the QA process for Mono, our fabulous QA team has been packaging various popular open source .NET applications, Gnome, Gtk#, ASP.NET, libraries and Windows.Forms in an easy-to-install fashion for various Linux distributions.

We are using the OpenSUSE Build Service to make the software available for various Linux distributions.

Our repository is available here, for instructions on how to add the repository see the user manual.

Mono C# Compiler Under MIT X11 License

Starting with version 2.0 of Mono, the Mono C# compiler source code will also be available under the MIT X11 license.

We are changing the license to allow parts of the compiler to be reused as part of MonoDevelop, our LINQ class libraries and to embed it in ASP.NET.

In MonoDevelop: This will allow the compiler to be used to improve code-completion to support C# 3.0 as well as improving the heuristics when offering completions. This will reuse the front end and parts of the backend.

Compiler hosting inside ASP.NET: This will embed the whole compiler into the ASP.NET process, eliminating about one second for each compilation of a piece of code. In the past, for each request for an uncompiled resource, we would have to call the compiler, wait for its output and then load the output. This typically shaves between 0.7 to 1 second on those scenarios, ideal to improve the developer experience.

LINQ Class Libraries: This will allow us to reuse parts of the compiler in our System.Core implementation for LINQ for the current 3.5 generation and upcoming generations. Many corner cases are handled by the compiler, and we will now be able to lift those pieces. This will mostly use the backend of the compiler.