Mono 1.1.12 Released
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. Pedro, who worked on the DataGridView control, has continued to work on the control, and this version includes his latest updates. The Menu infrastructure has been improved, and System.Drawing is now 2.0 compatible.

The JIT compiler for S390 has been improved, PowerPC bugs exposed by new tests have been fixed, and bugs in floating point code generation for ARM processors have been fixed. The JIT compiler also has a new, better optimizer for dead code elimination, which will be even more useful in the next release when new optimizations will tend to produce more dead code.

The new debugger is working, but with bugs; X-Develop, a commercial multilanguage, cross-platform IDE from Omnicore that supports Mono, now has a GUI interface for the Mono debugger (www.omnicore.com).

An implementation of the registry is now available on Unix, and Iron Python 0.9.6 can run on this release of Mono. Mono now has an embeddable HttpListner Web server, many bugs were fixed in the mbas compiler, and the Npqsgl database driver was upgraded to use the latest version (1.0beta1).

There are a number of updates to the .NET 2.0 classes, including performance improvements in Parse, implementations for the 2.0 string compares, System.Globalization, System.Text 2.0 (including updated CJK codecs), updated reflection code, and URI parsers. The System.XML 2.0 API is done, except for System.XML.Serialization. Last-minute changes to Nullable boxing conventions are partially implemented, it still has some bugs, and some changes need to be made to the run time as well. Work continues on the System.Configuration namespace needed for ASP.NET 2.0. The named and unnamed 2.0 Semaphore classes have been implemented.

Portable.NET
Last month I noted that Portable.NET had received two US$4,500 grants (totaling US$9,000) for completion of LibJit, and the addition of a C# front end for LibJit. This raised the question of what happened to the US$4,500 donated as prize money for work on SWF last year. It turns out that only US$500 had been claimed, so US$1,700 was awarded to Gopal for his work on the project; so, there is still US$2,300 of that prize money to be claimed by developers. Join the project and maybe you can earn part of it.

Two big changes coming in the next release of Portable.NET will be the use of LibCrayons (a lightweight drawing library created specifically to implement System.Drawing) as the back end for System.Drawing, and the use of LibJit in Portable.NET.

New Mono Book from Apress
Apress has released Practical Mono another book on Mono. It covers WinForms under Mono (including a section on 2.0 controls), ASP.NET (including how to set up both the Apache server and the Mono XSP server), GTK+, and other important parts of Mono. The book uses System.Windows.Forms to create an RSS aggregator using many common WinForms controls, including a data grid. .NET Developer's Journal and I have made an agreement that I will write a book review for the magazine each month in 2006. This started last month with a review of .NET 2.0 Generics from WROK press, Pro ADO.NET 2.0 from Apress this month, and Mono: A Developer's Notebook from O'Reilly next month. A full review of Practical Mono will appear at some point in the next few months. Suffice to say, the book is worth its US$49.99 price, and you should not wait for the full review to add it to your bookshelf. I will also be reviewing two other books on Mono, Cross-Platform .NET Development, also from Apress, and the aforementioned Mono: A Developers Notebook.

Odds and Ends
There has been some code checked in to Mono as a start on COM Interop; this is interesting, but it is hard to tell what will come of it.

Firebird has a release candidate for version 1.5.3, and a first beta of version 2.0. The project also now has a newsletter, and has published a roadmap for 2006. The plan is to have a beta release of version 3.0 towards the end of the year that will be based on the "Vulcan" project, which is a heavily refractored version of Firebird. Firebird is the open source database based on code from the Borland Interbase product. You can get all of the code, programs, the document mentioned above, and more from their home page at www.firebirdsql.org.