Mono 0.20

Release date: 23 Feb 2003

Hello everyone!

The Mono Team introduces the best Mono release so far we have done. Thanks to everyone who contributed fixes, code, ideas, and bug reports.

Mono 0.20 has been released, it is available at the usual location:

http://www.mono-project.com/download/

This is a truly heroic release of Mono. Major architectural chunks that were missing, or were miss-implemented have been fixed in this release, and we are very proud of it. Please see the list of features, because there is no short way of introducing just how good this release is. A big thanks goes to Piers for setting up a Tinderbox that monitors problems with the Mono CVS repository.

We released packages for SuSE 8.0, Mandrake 8.2, and various Red Hat releases. It is also available from Red Carpet on the Mono channel.

Source code for Mono, MCS, the Mono Debugger, XSP is available as well from that web page. The sources are:

MCS package (Class Libraries, C# and VB.NET compiler and managed tools):

http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.20.tar.gz

Mono package (Runtime engine, JIT compiler):

http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.20.tar.gz

XSP package (XSP test web server for ASP.NET webforms):

http://www.go-mono.com/archive/xsp-0.3.tar.gz

This release is brought to you by: Alvaro del Castillo, Alan Tam, Alp Toker, Alejandro Sánchez, Alexandre Pigolkin, Atsushi Enomoto, Brian Ritchie, Christopher Bockner, Daniel Lopez, Daniel Morgan, Dennis Hayes, Dick Porter, Dietmar Maurer, Duncan Mak, Gaurav Vaish, Gonzalo Paniagua, Jackson Harper, Jaime Anguiano, Jeff Stedfast, Johannes Roith, John Sohn, Jonathan Pryor, “Lee Mallabone, “Lluis Sanchez, “Marco Ridoni, Mark Crichton, Martin Baulig, Martin Willemoes Hansen, Miguel de Icaza, Mike Kestner, Nick Drochak, Paolo Molaro, Patrik Torstensson, Pedro Martinez, Per Arneng, Peter Williams, Petr Danecek, Piers Haken, Radek Doulik, Rafael Teixeira, Rodrigo Moya, Sebastien Pouliot, Tim Coleman, Ville Palo, and Zoltan Varga.

They commited 1810 changes to CVS patches in the past 33 days.

New in this release

Zoltan and IKVM

Zoltan’s patches to run Jeroen’s IKVM (the Java VM that translates JVM bytecodes into .NET bytecodes) are in.

Remoting

The remoting team’s patches that were held off on the previous release are here. Lluis and Patrik have done a fantastic job in getting remoting to work. Many low-level runtime engine changes, and plenty of work on the class-library stuff.

Lluis has posted a couple of sample applications to the mailing list, you can try those out.

The new release includes a working BinaryFormatter and BinaryFormatterSink. It means that together with TcpChannel it is possible to make remote calls with any type of parameters and return values, including value types, MarshalByRefObject types (that are properly marshalled/unmarshalled), delegates, enums, etc.

RemotingConfiguration is partially implemented. It cannot read from config files, but manual configuration using the api is fully working.

Implemented full support for client activated types and for well known objects (both singleton and single call).

Lease manager fully working (it manages the lifetime of server objects).

Implemented interception of the new operator, so it is possible to create a remote object using “new”, if the type is properly registered in RemotingConfiguration.

In Lluis’ words:

Basically, 0.20 will have almost all needed for a distributed application with Remoting

New threading semantics, IO-layer

Dick Porter in a couple of weeks has heroically redone much of the threading support to match the .NET behavior (details are on the .NET threading book as posted on the Mono site).

He also did a lot of bug fixes in the IO/threading space. The threading implementation now contains a new and faster Monitor implementation, as well as a correct Pulse()/Wait() implementation.

GC thread finalization has been re-enabled. This means that finalizers will be ran on a separate thread, as done in the Microsoft.NET Framework. This might expose some bugs on existing finalizer code.

Moved to NUnit2

Nick and Gonzalo helped us move to the new NUnit2 platform for all of our tests. A big applause goes to them.

Cross Appdomain invocations work now

ASP.NET and NUnit2 both used cross appdomain invocations, we have fixed a number of problems, and they are now functional.

The AppDomain fixes and the Remoting fixes have allowed us to remove a number of hacks in the ASP.NET implementation that were previously there.

Implemented CrossAppDomainChannel, for calls between domains.

C# Compiler and Debugging

When generating debugging information in the compiler (with -debug, -g or -debug+) the compiler will embed the debugging information into the resulting executable instead of generating a separate file. Very nice.

Generating debugging information has also improved vastly performance-wise, and now it is possible to always use debugging builds for software development.

A number of bugs were fixed on the compiler as well and by using the Mono profiler we have reduced the memory consumption and accelerated the compiler.

Thanks to Jackson, Martin, Paolo and for helping here.

VB.NET Compiler

Plenty of new features are included in the compiler in our path to conformance. See <FIXME:get-url-for-posting> for details on the status of the compiler, and the pieces missing.

ILasm and Mono.PEToolkit

Work on the IL assembler has resumed, but it is not yet ready for production use. The Mono IL Assembler uses the Mono.PEToolkit library done by Sergey and Jackson to manipulate CIL image files.

Cryptographic work

Sebastien has provided a cert2spc and secutil tools for certificate management. This is the first release that ships an assembly for System.Security

Also a new internal assembly used only on Windows allows Mono users to use the unmanaged crypto providers.

System.XML

Atsushi has continued to improve the work on our XML implementation: fixing bugs and more closely matching the Microsoft implementation.

More PowerPC/Alpha support

Taylor Christopher has contributed more code generation macros for PPC and Laramie Leavitt for Alpha.

System.XML.Xsl

Gonzalo continued the implementation of our XSLT transformation API (custom .NET functions are still missing though). It no longer uses temporary files to apply transformations. Thanks to an idea from Zdravko Tashev. Xslt Web controls work as part of this fix.

ASP.NET

Gonzalo has cleaned up a lot the code base, and now our test server supports a –root and –virtual command line options for better control.

Also, now we generate a much nicer error page on errors. We are looking for volunteers to improve the default look of this page.

Authentication is now supported

Mobile Controls

Gaurav Vaish continues on his quest to complete the implementation of the Mobile controls. These controls are required to run a stock IBuySpy application.

Class Libraries

New Mono.Posix class library that contains classes for working on a Posix systems. Things like Unix domain sockets are here.

System.Windows.Forms

Alexandre Pigolkine continues to contribute more code to our Windows.Forms implementation. Currently it only runs on Windows (or in Linux without GC enabled, due to the pthread/Wine threading library mismatch. This is being actively addressed as part of the Wine work due to the movement to the new thread implementation available in RH 8.1).

Database providers

Christopher Bockner has updated his DB2 database provider (now with prepared statement functionality) and Tim Coleman has continued work on the Oracle database provider (welcome back Tim!)

Database code

Dan Morgan continues to develop core components in System.Data (and now we welcome Alan Tam to the System.Data core hackers)

The SQL# tool now supports MySQLNet, Npgsql, DB2Client, and Oracle clients.

Runtime

mono --profile now performs memory allocation profiling too.

Runtime fixes

We now support multi-module with external file reference assemblies.

The above in English means that we can now run Eiffel.NET code in Mono.

Monograph

More statistics supported now.

System.Web.Mail

Per has contributed the code for this namespace.

Bugs

Plenty of bugs were closed.