Apr 20, 2004: S390 port; Interpreted Updated; Identity classes; System.Drawing; Mono Debugger.

Neale who originally wrote the S390 interpreter support for Mono has checked into CVS his port of the S390 JIT engine. Now, if we could only have one of those in our living room.

Bernie has checked into CVS a new interpreter for the Mono runtime. This new interpreter translates the CIL opcodes into a new intermediate representation. The new IL representation avoids doing costly lookups during interpretation which means that the interpreter is a lot faster now.

Performance wise, the new interpreter is three times faster than the old one when doing a compiler bootstrap.

Sebastien has recently completed the identity classes in the Mono Runtime, you can see more details on his blog

New progress on the GDI+ front: Jordi has completed the region code; Ravindra the various brushes that we must support; Sanjay the Icon and BMP loaders (with Mark) and Vladimir has contributed various codecs and a new fresh implementation of Image.LockBits.

Lluis and Atsushi in the meantime has been in charge of completing various pending items from our class libraries: basically an API audit of the things missing for the Mono 1.0 release, small but important things.

Martin has replaced the old command-line language in the debugger with our home-grown "Command Line" language, a TCL-like command line language that we built for it (its a tiny .NETized Tcl-like language). The interaction process is a lot smoother than it used to be and we are focusing on the usability of the command line language to improve the debugging experience.

Apr 02, 2004: Mono C# Compiler gets CLS support; Basic Runtime Contribution from Mainsoft.

Marek Safar has been working for a few months on adding support to the C# compiler to support the various checks required by the Common Language Specification (CLS).

In the past the C# compiler was unable to flag any problems related to the creation of cross-language libraries. Today with this patch the compiler will properly flag errors in CLS compliance. Tests for all of the errors have also been included on CVS.

Mainsoft has contributed an implementation of their Basic runtime to the project. The runtime they wrote is written in Java and we are translating this into C# code. The code will reach CVS within the next few weeks.

Mainsoft also contributed an extensive regression test suite for the Basic runtime, a port of the NIST XML tests and their own in-house developed XML tests.

Mar 31st, 2004: Gtk# 0.18, MonoDoc 0.13, MonoDevelop 0.2 released

New versions of Gtk# and MonoDoc have been released.

Gtk# is available from Gtk# home page and MonoDoc 0.13 is available from our download page.

Gtk# now features [ConnectBefore] attribute for hooking up signals; An automake/autoconf setup; the System.Drawing dependency has been dropped and many more docs.

And MonoDevelop 0.2 has been released.

Mar 18th, 2004: Mono 0.31 has been released

We have released version 0.31 of Mono. All the new features and improvements are described in our Mono 0.31 Release Notes.

You can download Mono 0.31 packages using Red Carpet, or pick the individual packages from our download page.

Mar 15th, 2004: Async IO lands on Mono.

Gonzalo has completed the implementation of Async I/O for Mono using the kernel aio_* interfaces. If your operating system supports the aio_ POSIX interface, the FileStream methods that expose asynchronous methods will use this facility instead of emulating it with threads as we have done in the past.

We had this request come to us from various people in the past, and we are now looking for your help to test and debug this.

Mar 11th, 2004: Mono JIT ported to SPARC.

Zoltan Varga announced today that the SPARC port of the Mono JIT engine has been completed. Congratulations to Zoltan for this amazing development.

Feb 26th, 2004: Agenda: Mono Meeting in Boston.

The agenda for the Mono Meeting is now available: Mono Meeting Agenda

Feb 24th, 2004: Mono Meeting in Boston.

On March 5th-6th (Friday and Saturday) there will be an open-house meeting for people interested in Mono to get together with the Mono developers at the Novell offices in in Cambridge Massachusetts (directions).

The whole Novell Mono team will be here (Atsushi Enomoto, Dick Porter, Duncan Mak, Erik Dasque, Gonzalo Paniagua, Jackson Harper, Jordi Mas, Lluis Sanches, Manjula, Martin Baulig, Miguel de Icaza, Mike Kestner, Paolo Molaro, Peter Bartok, Sebastien Pouliot, Sachin Kumar) and hopefully Joe Shaw, Nat Friedman, Peter Williams and Ravi Pratap will be joining us as well. Expect to see Todd Berman from MonoDevelop as well.

If you are coming, please notify edasque@ximian.com about it, so we can add you to the security list, and use the `open house confirmation' subject in your email.

Feb 13, 2004: Mono 0.30.1 released

We have released a small bug-fix release of Mono, the release notes are available here and you can download it from our download page.

Feb 13, 2004: Mono Performance Optimization

We have a new document that describes some common tricks to improve the performance of your Mono or .NET application. These are a summary of techniques that we employed to tune our own C# compiler.

Feb 2nd, 2004: Mono 0.30 has been released

Check out the Release notes for details on Mono 0.30. Or go directly to our download section

Jan 18th, 2004: LDAP class libraries in Mono tutorial.

Sunil Kumar has written an introduction to Novell.LDAP class libraries, which are part of Mono.

Jan 13th, 2004: MonoDoc 0.9 released.

A new edition of MonoDoc, the Mono Documentation Browser, has been released, available in source form from: archive/monodoc-0.9.tar.gz

Jan 11th, 2004: Call for Stories

If you have a success story about using Mono or one of the Mono components in any way, we want to hear about you. Please mail your details to miguel@ximian.com

Jan 4th, 2004: Windows Installer for Mono 0.29

There is a Windows Installer for Mono 0.29 available now.