Mono 1.1.16 Release

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Release date: 05 Jul 2006

This is the third beta towards the release of Mono 1.2.

Mono was branched at version 1.1.13 to become the stable version of Mono that is distributed by Novell on its enterprise products. That series of releases are only getting bug fixes.

Before each release we run all of the regression tests on Mono, so we consider this release usable for deployment, but there are still a few changes in various areas.

All of the changes since 1.0 are documented in the following release notes: 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4, 1.1.5, 1.1.6, 1.1.7, 1.1.8, 1.1.9, 1.1.10, 1.1.13, 1.1.14 and 1.1.15

This release is mostly a bug-fix release, there are very few new developments.

Changes since Mono 1.1.15

Highlights

IronPython 1.0 Beta 8 works with this release out of the box.

Majorly improved Windows.Forms and System.Drawing as our beta program for Windows.Forms continues.

New default optimizations boost performance for compute intensive applications.

Long standing debugging line numbers bug fixed.

Preview code for the new Compacting GC.

Hardened runtime for verification, AppDomain unloading and type loading failures

Significant progress on ASP.NET 2.0, some Starter Kits are now functional, as well as large improvements to its test suite.

Windows.Forms

Windows.Forms continues to be a focus of bug fixing in this release.

Multi-thread support for Windows.Forms: In the past our Windows.Forms implementation behaved like most other toolkits in Unix. It was not a multi-threaded toolkit. With this released Windows.Forms has become multi-threaded (multi-thread considerations still apply), but multiple threads can create their own forms and controls and have their own separate message processing loops.

Repaint logic changed: Instead of having paint events that are contained in the queue and make their way to the head of the queue, we now only generate synthetic paint events for dirty windows once the queue is emtpy. This matches MS behaviour and allows for a more responsive UI if lots of activity (or slow drawing) happens.

MDI support has been improved extensively by Jackson.

DataGrid support has been improved extensively by Chris and is much more usable now.

Many performance improvements went into the tree control.

System.Drawing

Sebastien implemented the GraphicsPath.AddPathString methods which add the outlines of a string into the path.

Bill Holmes and Sebastien teamed up to fix many of the LinearGradient brush bugs.

Peter and Gonzalo reimplemented the image infrastructure to fix several bugs.

Property reading for PNG files is now supported.

Sebastien: BeginContainer support

Sebastien: Region handles (GdipGetRegionHRgn, GdipCreateRegionHrgn and GdipSetClipHrgn).

Sebastien: Added support for point visibility on paths, GdipIsOutlineVisiblePathPoint[I] and GdipIsVisiblePathPoint[I] functions are now implemented;

Runtime

Stack traces line numbers fixed. In the past, stack traces pointed to the next statement, which typically translated into line offsets being “off by one”, in reality they were off by a statement, which confused developers. The line information is now correctly reported.

Paolo’s new Generational GC has been integrated into Mono, but it is not currently supported. Documentation is available in Compacting_GC and docs/precise-gc.

The compacting GC currently only works on the 1.0 profile of Mono, the 2.0 support has not been modified yet to work with it, so full Mono bootstraps will fail with it.

Zoltan fixed many leaks and bugs related to unloading assemblies. Also, this version of the runtime is friendlier to shutting down Mono (for hosting users, this was driven by Otee’s Unity needs).

Verification and reliability work: work has resumed on implementing verification on Mono, as some users (SecondLife in particular) need this feature. In addition to the verification work, we have started to strengthen the runtime to cope with missing or broken referenced assemblies. All known filed bugs that made the runtime crash will now produce a TypeLoadException.

Jonathan Chambers has contributed some initial bits for COM support in Mono. This includes BSTR and VARIANT marshalling on Windows.

IronPython beta 8 works out of the box. IronPython on each release has been adding dependencies into new .NET 2.0 features that were not yet implemented in Mono, hence the need to update our support as they move along.

Sebastien added support for .NET 2.0 declarative security to the runtime.

Performance

Massi enabled the inline optimization by default, which improves performance in many conditions. To enable inlining, it was necessary to tune a number of other optimizations (constant propagation, dead code elimination).

The improvements give 6% boost in XmlMark, 3% on SciMark, 15% on the particle benchmark, 1.85% on mcs bootstrap, on x86 systems.

On x86-64, it produces 6% boost on XmlMark, 0.4% on SciMark, 19.5% on particle benchmark, and 2.6% on mcs bootstrap.

Full optimizations and SSA optimizations are also very good, but the individual optimizations have not been tuned to work with each other. More detailed information created by Massi about the new improvements are available here.

ASP.NET 2.0

The Mainsoft team (Vladimir Krasnov, Andrew Skiba, and Konstantin Triger) has contributed many updates to the ASP.NET 2.0 support and it is now able to run the ASP.NEt Personal Web Site Starter Kit.

Most of the bugs were in the theme and skin support.

ASP.NET 2.0 Test Suite

The testing team at Mainsoft (Yoni Klain, Tal Klar, Andrew Skiba, and Merav Soudri) has enhanced the System.Web NUnit test suite:

  • A testing framework package that provides Web Hosting capabilities, which enables testing the entire System.Web functionalities, including post backs, context related features (Master Page, Themes and Skins) and more.
  • An HTML Compare package that performs an advanced HTML comparing, by transferring HTML into XML and compares the XML. (An “ignore” tags/ attributes mechanism is also supported).
  • Developed 23 new test fixtures (~220 tests) for System.Web 2.0 using the above framework, testing 23 System.Web.UI.WebControls classes. Work on this path continues towards full coverage of System.Web 2.0.

C# Compiler Bug Fixes

Marek implemented Type forwarding (see bug 77002) in the compiler.

Harinath implemented several important changes in the compiler:

Several bugs in handling ‘lvalue’ accesses have been fixed. In particular, we propagate ‘lvalue’ lookups of value-type fields to their surrounding objects, allowing better detection of access to read-only fields and MarshalByRef objects.

The flow-analysis code in the compiler has been overhauled. This fixes several bugs related to handling of ‘goto’s, unreachable code, and warnings about undefined variables. We also fixed the code generator to emit the ‘leave’ instruction rather than ‘br’ when jumping out of an unwind-protected region (try { … } finally { … }, lock { … }, using { … }, etc.)

The code for numeric promotions has been rewritten to align more closely with the standard. In particular, we now follow the “overloading” specification used in the standard: the original code implemented a non-normative (informative) section of the standard which provided an intuitive explanation of the semantics. This rewrite now allows expressions involving user-defined conversions to numeric types.

Martin implemented support for switch on nullable types, a feature that did not make it in time to the C# standard but is available in the Microsoft compiler and the annotated C# standard.

2.0 Features

Many updates from Atsushi to the 2.0 profile.

S390 and S390x Port

Neale fixed a critical bug in the S390 and S390x port, the atomic interlock operations are now functional on this architecture.

OSX support

Mach port leaks identified by Imeem are now fixed, patch from Allan.

Packages for Mono on OSX/Intel are now available.

IO Layer

Dick fixed a complex problem dealing with resource starvation problem with thread handles (78241).

GetCurrentThread now matches MS behavior.

Debugger

Lots of work from Martin in the debugger, the major features are:

  • Breakpoints are saved across runs of a program.
  • Many bug fixes, and it is now possible to debug xsp and Winforms applications (no full ASP.NET yet).

XBuild

A major breakthrough in this release from Marek: XBuild is able to build some Visual Studio.NET 2005 projects (that don’t contain references to assemblies not in GAC nor use resources).

In addition, there is now support for simple conditions in xbuild.

Tools

monodis and ilasm now support the 2.0 declarative security attributes (Sebastien and Ankit).

Ankit also updated ilasm to support custom attributes on assemblies, return types of methods and custom modifiers.

mono-find-requires and mono-find-provides will now only list GAC dependencies. In the past they listed all dependencies, which meant that there were implicit dependencies on private assemblies.

NUnit

NUnit Mocks framework has been integrated into the standard Mono distribution.

CAS Tests

This is the first release to enable the CAS tests during the build process.

Cairo

The Mono.Cairo library has been updated to the 1.2 Cairo API (John Luke).

Coverity and Bug Fixing

In this release we have included a number of bug fixes that were uncovered by the Coverity source code scanning tool. Thanks to Coverity for including Mono on their stack of open source applications that they scan.

Installing Mono 1.1.16

./configure --prefix=/devel

You can then setup your PATH to include /devel/bin to access the Mono 1.1. Alternatively you can replace your Mono installation with 1.1.16

Binary Packages and Source Code Downloads:

Source code and pre-compiled packages for SUSE, SLES, Fedora Core 3, 4, RHEL, MacOS and Windows in a variety of platforms available from our web site from the download section.

Quick source code installation:

If we have no packages for your platform, installing from source code is very simple.

mono:

tar xzf mono-1.1.16.tar.gz
cd mono-1.1.16
./configure
make
make install

Then compile libgdiplus:

tar xzf libgdiplus-1.1.16.tar.gz
cd libgdiplus-1.1.16
./configure
make
make install