http://dotnet.sys-con.com/ Latest articles from Dennis Hayes Copyright 2008 .NET DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:33:00 GMT .NET DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL 10 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/575276.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/575276.htm Sat, 24 May 2008 11:15:00 GMT Time sneaks up on us. Last month's issue started year six of 'Monkey Business' in .NET Developer's Journal. Many thanks to all the readers who made this milestone possible. Last November marked the beginning of my seventh year with the Mono project. The Mono team has released version 1.0 of the MonoDevelop IDE. It was created as a Linux fork of SharpDevelop 1.x back in 2003. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/575292.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/575292.htm Sat, 24 May 2008 08:00:00 GMT This is a well-written book, full of tips and traps, and enough source code snippets to make it worth buying for that reason alone. It's value-packed with information from someone who clearly knows what he's talking about. It's one of the better books I've seen on LINQ and will be a welcome addition to my bookshelf. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/531934.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/531934.htm Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:45:00 GMT The Mono Web site has, in some cases, been downloading a very old version of Mono. It serves as a fine example of what can go wrong with software, even with the best of intentions, and without anyone really making a mistake. What happened was back in May 2005, the Mono team added accessibility features to its Web site, including the little yellow pop-up balloons for screen readers. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/497161.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/497161.htm Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT Mono has released version 1.2.6 and it includes a lot of good stuff. One big addition in 1.2.6 for Mac fans includes a native Winforms driver for OS X that lets Winforms-based applications to run without X Server. This is good news because it means better performance, and will allow future themes, and deeper integration, including the use of other Carbon APIs, better drag-and-drop support, docking icons, and other interface improvements. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/478965.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/478965.htm Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT In part because of MoMA, the Mono analyzer, there were 1,907 new methods implemented in this release, System.Data is 99% compatible with .NET 2.0, and about 150 bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms alone. This was the first version released after Novell hired a full-time QA person for Mono, and Mono set up a new release procedure. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/461417.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/461417.htm Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT Just as I'm finishing this column, Miguel comes on chat (#mono on irc.gnome.) and mentions that the media embargo on project 'Barking Duck' will be lifted at midnight. 'Project Barking Duck' is an inside joke at Mono and not actually a project. But the media embargo was real. At midnight, Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/439248.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/439248.htm Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMT SharpDevelop has released version 2.2. Version 2.2 is mostly a bug fix release, but also adds support for newer versions of Boo (0.7.8), NUnit(2.4.1) and Wix (2.0.5325), Cecil (0.5), additional templates have been added, and SharpDevelop Reports 2.2 are included while support for the old SharpDB Tools has been dropped. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/406635.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/406635.htm Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:15:00 GMT Microsoft has a new set of technologies called Silverlight that are meant to bring rich multimedia to browsers and portable devices. They have released two versions: a full release of version 1.0 and a beta version of 1.1. Version 1.0 is not very interesting, but the 1.1 beta is totally different and is making a big splash. It is .NET based, and of course Mono is working furiously on it. In fact, after Miguel saw Silverlight for the first time at the Microsoft MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas and was offered the chance to demo Moonlight (the Mono version of Silverlight) at Microsoft Re-MIX 07 in Paris in 21 days, the whole Mono team started on a 21-day death march to implement Moonlight in time to demo it in Paris. After which, Miguel said 'The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day -including weekends - to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time.' http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/406654.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/406654.htm Sat, 04 Aug 2007 13:15:00 GMT BPEL or Business Process Execution Language is an XML and Web standards-based SOA (service-oriented architecture) standard that allows business people to combine services into automated processes. As described in this review, Active Endpoints' ActiveBPEL product family includes a visual designer that works by allowing non-programmers to assemble Web services into processes by dragging and dropping graphical representations of components (Web services) and 'wiring' them together in sequences and flowcharts. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/382448.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/382448.htm Sat, 09 Jun 2007 17:45:00 GMT Mono version 1.2.4 has just been released. Typically source code for a release is branched off for final clean up and bug fixing, with the release coming a few days to a week later; for this version, there were almost 25 days between branch and release. This may have been due in part to distractions such as the 24 new Google Summer of Code (SOC) programmers and the new Silverlight beta, but mostly I think it was because the team sees this release as more than just a point release, so they spent extra time testing it to make sure it was good. Another factor is the size of this release. As I mentioned last month, it contains over 20 megabytes of diff files, and the release notes point that out with the help of Moma, it also contains over 1,000 newly implemented APIs (680 new APIs, 290 not implemented, and 43 TODOs done). http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/377599.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/377599.htm Tue, 29 May 2007 18:00:00 GMT Portable.NET has released PNET 0.8, its first packaged release in more than a year. There were many improvements over the course of the year, but the biggest were associated with the upgrade to the new Libjit JIT engine. The source code is at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/dotgnu-pnet, and Boris Manojlovic has created windows installer that can be downloaded at www.steki.net/dotGNU/JIT/dotGNU_0_8_0.exe. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/367671.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/367671.htm Mon, 07 May 2007 07:00:00 GMT When the first draft of the C# 2.0 spec was released, the Mono team started working on it immediately. The first draft of the C# 3.0 spec has now been out for almost a year, but the Mono team has just started to work on it. There are two reasons for this: one is that the whole team was working on the major 1.2 release, including Winforms. The second reason is that the first draft of the C# 3.0 spec was released shortly after the official release of C# 2.0, and the Mono team was still busy fixing bugs, cleaning up code, and integrating last-minute changes to the C# 2.0 spec. Because a lot of C# 3.0 relies heavily on the new C# 2.0 features, the mono team also wanted to get C# 2.0 refactored and on a solid footing before beginning work on C# 3.0. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/357361.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/357361.htm Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:00:00 GMT Mono has released version 1.2.3, and there are a lot of improvements and additions. In my opinion, the biggest addition is the new Visual Basic compiler. It's not ready for prime time and is still officially unsupported, but this is the first version of VB to be included as a standard part of a release. Note that it only targets VB8 and .NET 2.0; there are no plans to make it backward-compatible with .NET 1.1 (The runtime supports .NET 1.1 so programs compiled with Microsoft Visual Basic 1.1 will run under Mono.) http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/346936.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/346936.htm Fri, 16 Mar 2007 10:00:00 GMT Mono 1.2.2 was released last month, and with the help of the Mono Migration Tool, Moma, which was discussed last month, 496 new methods were added, 212 'bogus' to-dos were removed, and 65 NotImplementedExceptions were removed. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/319765.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/319765.htm Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:00:00 GMT When a project like Mono approaches a major release like version 1.2, the code is forked: copied into a separate branch in version control. In one copy, the 'main' branch, work continues normally, while the code in the other 'release' branch goes through a series of freezes leading up to its release. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/315053.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/315053.htm Sun, 24 Dec 2006 22:30:00 GMT The long-awaited third major release of Mono, version 1.2 is now out. The main delay was getting System.Windows.Forms (SWF) to work cross platform. This has been accomplished for the most part. There are a few of the rarely used methods still being worked on, but the vast majority of Windows applications should work: just copy the .exe file to a Linux box or a MAC with Mono installed. The Mono implementation of Winforms supports themes with several included in the current version. Mono even supports WinProc, so many third-party controls that rely on Windows messages will run correctly. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/294708.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/294708.htm Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:00:00 GMT The highlight of this release is the new MonoBASIC compiler and runtime. The availability of BASIC on Mono has waxed and waned over the years. During the early days of Mono, BASIC received little or no attention. The biggest reason was that all the effort was going into the C # compiler. In addition, the early Mono adopters were not very interested in VB; in fact at the time, there was much debate in the VB community in general about upgrading to VB.NET because of the complexity of VB.NET, and the lack of backwards compatibility with VB6. Also, unlike C# which was released as a ECMA and ISO standard, VB.NET was, and still is, a proprietary product with no publicly available definition (that has the details needed by a compiler writer). http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/275455.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/275455.htm Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:30:00 GMT Mono 1.1.16, the third beta of version 1.2, has been released. The time span between the release of versions 1.1.15 and 1.1.16 is one of the longest in several years and the number of changes included reflects that, again System.Windows.Forms (SWF) and System.Drawing got the most attention. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/275454.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/275454.htm Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:00:00 GMT This book is one of the newest self-paced training courses from Microsoft Press. It covers the 70-536 exam (.NET Framework 2.0 Application Development) which is required for both of the new Microsoft certifications, the Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) (for Web, Windows, and Distributed applications), and Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) (for Web, Windows, and Enterprise developers). It includes a DVD with a 90-day evaluation version of Visual Studio Professional Edition, a CD with a copy of this book in ebook form, sample code from the exercises in the book, and software for sample practice tests. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/253482.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/253482.htm Sat, 05 Aug 2006 12:00:00 GMT The Mono project celebrates its 5th anniversary this month. The Mono project was launched in July 2001; I started following Mono in the press almost immediately, and soon started checking the homepage. In November I downloaded the source, and in February 2002 I started contributing to System.Drawing and System.Window.Forms. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/253480.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/253480.htm Fri, 04 Aug 2006 13:00:00 GMT This is a big book weighing in at over 1,200 pages. Note the 'Pro' in the title. If you want to learn how to design Web sites, this book is not for you; it's meant for the professional Web designer needing to build serious, real-world Web sites that are scalable and secure. This is the complete book for the professional; it covers all the basic parts such as the history of ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2005, upgrading old projects, and WebForm basics, but these are covered fleetingly and assumes the reader already knows the concepts and has enough experience to figure out the details for himself. For those getting started in ASP.NET or Web development in general, I recommend Beginning ASP.NET in C# 2005 from Apress (ISBN 1-59059-572-6) or Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Step by Step from Microsoft Press (ISBN 0-7356-2201-9). http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/231981.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/231981.htm Fri, 30 Jun 2006 10:00:00 GMT Google will be bringing the Summer of Code (SOC) back this year. College students from around the world will be paid $4,500 by Google to work on Open Source projects, and Mono and DotGNU will be participating again, as will the WINE project (a Mono bridge is one option for a WINE project proposal), OpenOffice.org, GNOME, Beagle, and my favorite, the Mars Space Flight Facility (I spent my summer on Mars!) will also be mentoring projects (Google funds students to work on all the projects). http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/231968.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/231968.htm Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:15:00 GMT This book is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Building an ASP.NET Page,' covers basic Web page development. The second part, 'Adding Data in an ASP.NET Site,' covers data in ASP.NET, including data providers, containers, data binding, grids, and viewing data. The third part, 'ASP.NET Infrastructure,' covers the HTTP request context, state management, caching, and security. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/217558.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/217558.htm Sun, 21 May 2006 17:30:00 GMT Mono has released version 1.1.13.5 and 1.1.14. Version 1.1.13.5 is actually the first release since 1.1.13, even though there were four internal releases in between. The purpose of this release is to document the changes in those releases; there are no new features in this release, just bug fixes in all areas of the project. One reason for multiple releases was to keep testers current during the run-up to the major 1.2 release. Release notes are at http://go-mono.com/archive/1.1.13.5. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/217552.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/217552.htm Fri, 19 May 2006 14:30:00 GMT Mark Mamone is a program lead and solutions architect for British Telecom, and he's been involved in .NET since Beta 1; he's presently spearheading a Mono-driven project for BT. Mamone has co-authored several books, including Beginning Fedora 2, Beginning Red Hat Linux 9, and Professional Windows Forms. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/204822.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/204822.htm Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:15:00 GMT This column begins its fourth year. In the past I haven't done any year-in-review articles mainly because there was always too much news. But now that the Mono project is half-way through its fifth year and nears its third major release, version 1.2, I think it's time to look back at some of the major milestones that the project has passed, and mention a couple of milestone that it should reach in the near future. I will start this month with the Top 3 and then finish up next month. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/204821.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/204821.htm Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:00:00 GMT What is required for true cross platform development using .NET? On one hand, not much; on the other hand, a great deal. Because Rotor, Pnet, Mono and (the Microsoft implementation of) .NET, are all based on the ECMA standard, getting a basic C# program running on all four platforms is typically just a matter of copying the .exe file to the machine and executing it (assuming a .NET framework is already on the machine). But what about remoting, serializing and deserializing classes, interoperability, using native code, and non-ECMA classes such as System.Data and System.Windows.Forms (SWF)? This book covers those questions in detail with good practical advice; but that is not the best part of this book. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/192535.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/192535.htm Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:00:00 GMT The 1.1.13 version of Mono has also been released. This version will be shipped with Novel/Suse Enterprise products. It also serves as a feature freeze point for the upcoming major 1.2 release, with the exception of System.Windows.Forms (SWF) and libgdiplus, which are still being developed. The 1.1.13 branch will also receive back-ports of all bug fixes until it is replaced with the 1.2 version. 1.1.13 is mostly bug fixes (including hundreds in the SWF namespace). The main additions to this release are a completed 64 bit S390 port, an implementation of the new 2.0 System.Threading primitives, updates to System.Net.Mail and System.Net.Mime, and typed data returns for Sqlite 3. One major enhancement is the inclusion of a printing framework for SWF. This will not be really usable until Cairo is updated, but it is still a milestone I have been looking forward to seeing. More than 70 people worked on this release. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/192534.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/192534.htm Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:00:00 GMT The authors of this book, Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, are well known in both the Linux and .NET communities, and are well suited to write a book on the Mono project. Edd Dumbill also coauthored Linux Unwired and XML-RPC, and is an Editor at Large for O'Reilly books. Niel Bornstein also wrote .NET and XML, and is now a consultant for Novell in the Linux and open source practice group. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/180999.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/180999.htm Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:00:00 GMT The biggest changes in this release come in SWF (System.Windows.Forms). This makes sense, as SWF is moving into debugging mode in anticipation of having full support for SWF in the major 1.2 release expected in early 2006 (possibly by the time you read this). The 'Nice' theme has been improved, and a new 'ClearLooks' theme has been added. Newly supported features include MDI applications, toolwindow, and shortcut and key navigation. TextBox and RichTextBox now support cut and paste, including keybindings, drag and drop, and undo. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/180986.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/180986.htm Mon, 27 Feb 2006 12:00:00 GMT This book bills itself as the only ADO.NET you will ever need. This is a bit boisterous, but mostly true. This book covers pretty much all facets of ADO.NET programming, and covers them well. This well-written book can take an ADO.NET novice, and advance him or her to being an ADO.NET pro. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/171177.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/171177.htm Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:30:00 GMT Version 1.1.10 is another release packed with new code. The release notes can be found at www.go-mono.com/archive/1.1.10/, and can be downloaded from www.mono-project.com/Downloads. Mod_mono, the ASP.NET module for the Apache Web Server, now has an autoconfiguration tool that eliminates the old requirement that administrators manually import all of the directories containing ASP.NET code. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/171176.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/171176.htm Mon, 06 Feb 2006 14:00:00 GMT .NET 2.0 Generics is my favorite book of 2005. Well, other than Harry Potter anyway. This book is not for new programmers. To understand this book, I would recommend that you have about a year of programming experience, and at least six months with C++, C#, or Java. This book is well written and is best used as an introduction to generics, so it is of most use to an advanced beginner. The reader should be familiar the syntax of a C-derived language such as C++, Java, or C# 1.x, and be familiar with object oriented-programming issues such as inheritance, overloading, and overriding. No knowledge of generics is needed to make use of this book. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/163772.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/163772.htm Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:00:00 GMT The Code Project has sponsored 'The Race to Linux,' a contest to see how fast code could be converted from Windows to Linux. The race was broken into three parts. Each part required participants to convert one of the Microsoft ASP.NET starter kits to Linux using Mono, Grasshopper (see Monkey Business in .NETDJ Vol: 3, iss: 7), PHP, or other technologies of their choosing. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/154019.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/154019.htm Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:30:00 GMT It looks to me like that the 1.1.9 release of Mono is the biggest since Version 1.0. Many components went through major changes. 118 developers received credit for work done since version 1.1.8. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/143311.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/143311.htm Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:15:00 GMT There is a new version of the ECMA specs for C# Version 2.0 and the CLI; the Mono C# compiler and runtime is already compliant with these, and only a few class changes are needed to be compliant with the new libraries. As Miguel notes in his blog (http://tirania.org/blog/all.html), the first chapters of the C# specification are a decent tutorial for programmers wanting to learn C# (although I would not recommend it for those without prior programming experience). One note, although my understanding is that the spec has been approved, the text of the specs has not been fully ratified yet. The C# standard is at www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm, and the CIL spec is at www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/133792.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/133792.htm Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:30:00 GMT Portable.NET has released version 0.7.2; it is primarily a bug fix release for version 0.7.0, but also contains some new features. New versions of the libffi and libcg libraries are supported, the Debian build build/platform files have been updated, the Basic compiler includes some previously missing String functions, System.Windows.Forms and System.Drawing get improved color handling and general fixes and improvements; also improved DB2 support has been imported from the Mono project. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/121900.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/121900.htm Sat, 24 Sep 2005 17:00:00 GMT Portable.NET has made their first release in six months, and it is as packed with new code as you would expect; the list prints out to about four pages, and is downloadable from http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/2005-June/000056.html. The runtime engine gets a PowerPC unroller, enhanced profiling, and support for multiple engine instances. System.Windows.Forms receives over 20 enhancements and fixes. These include several improvements in form layout capabilities and string displays; the toolbox classes have also been started. TextBox, TreeView, TreeNode, and focus handling saw many improvements. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/113342.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/113342.htm Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:00:00 GMT Mainsoft has recently made several Mono-related announcements, centering on the new version of their Visual MainWin product, codenamed Grasshopper. Visual MainWin is a Visual Studio add-in that adds project types for VB.NET or C# that target J2EE servers on Linux; this allows a programmer to use Windows and Visual Studio to create ASP.NET and ADO.NET pages and programs that can run on both a .NET server and on a J2EE server. It does this by having two projects with the same source files, but different build files. The .NET project creates a normal .NET application, and the J2EE creates a J2EE application and the infrastructure needed for it to run under J2EE. Visual MainWin creates .NET IL (intermediate language) code using the Microsoft C# and VB.NET compilers and most of the Mono .NET libraries, including System, System.Web, System.WebServices, System.Data, System.XML, and other namespaces. It then converts the IL code to Java bytecode, and optimizes it into a .jar file. One library that is not shared between Mainsoft and Mono is the mscorlib assembly, as Mainsoft needs a special version for J2EE capability. http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/105677.htmhttp://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/105677.htm Wed, 29 Jun 2005 17:00:00 GMT Mono Version 1.1.7 Released Portable.NET plans 0.7 Mono version 1.1.7 has been released, and the Mono crew is planning their second major release (1.2) for September. The key to the 1.2 release is SWF (System.Windows.Forms); when SWF is ready for prime time, 1.2 will get released. Monthly releases will continue until then.