Google Summer of Code Update
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). You can find out more about the SOC at http://code.google.com/soc/, or see the Mono specifics at www.mono-project.com/StudentProjects, GNU projects can be found at www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas.html, and DotGNU-specific projects at http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas.html. Last year 21 projects participated; this year, the number has swollen to 85.

How did the projects go last year? It depends on the project. Mozilla sponsored 10 projects last year; none has been worked on since the end of the SOC, and only one still works with the current version, but one group has recently expressed interest in updating its project.

Mono, on the other hand, did well, with 11 out of 16 projects being completed successfully with the code being integrated into the main project, and six out of 11 students continued to work on the Mono project after SOC was completed. Ubuntu only gained one long-term contributor, but Gaim had good results. To see where the mentors and students involved with successful SOC projects were from last year, check out http://code.google.com/soc-map.html.

Mono 1.1.15
Mono has released version 1.1.15, a second beta on the way to the 1.2 major release. Several coders who were working on other projects have switched to working on System.Windows.Form (SWF) to get it ready for release. The release notes point out that this release of SWF has "too many bug fixes to enumerate." Some of the more complex parts of System.Drawing (non-rectangular regions) have been implemented, and many of the more difficult bugs (such as some in gradient brushes, matrices, and code access security) have been resolved as well. Themes have also been improved.

Many new tests have been added for all parts of the project.

ASP.NET now supports Member-shipProviders. Currently it only supports MSSQL, but support for other databases will be included soon. Register directives are now supported in themes and skin files. A number of regression bugs in ASP.NET 2.0 have also been fixed.

The C# compiler had a few bugs fixed, and got some modest optimizations.

XMLSerialization for XMLSchemas is now available for both .NET 1.1 and 2.0. Other .NET 2.0 enhancements include a freshly implemented StopWatch class, additions to the System.IO.Ports class, and System class signatures have been cleaned up to match the standard better. A new Resgen2 tool has also been written to work with .NET 2.0. The Xbuild utility has been updated to work better with .NET 2.0.

The debugger has better support for multi-threaded code.

Math Library
There is a heavy-duty, open source, managed math library available that works on both the Microsoft and Mono versions of .NET. The library has two parts. The first is a fully managed math library written in C# that includes complex math, matrix operations, and linear algebra. The second part is a C# wrapper for other math libraries including BLAS, LAPACK, and libraries from both Intel and AMD. Details are at www.dnanalytics.net/.

Odds and Ends
IronPython has released 1.0 Beta 6. As noted in previous columns, it is releasing so many betas to make it easy for testers to have the most recent updates to test against.

SharpDevelop has released version 2.0 Beta 3 of its IDE. It is focusing on bug fixes for the upcoming release, but it also adds ASP.NET templates and support for the Boo language. The project home page is at www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ and it has a community page at http://community.sharpdevelop.net/.

MonoDevelop, a Linux-only IDE for .NET development, has released version 0.11, which includes support for most of .NET 2.0 and allows easy selection of the .NET version being developed for.

Novell has released SUSE 10.1, which can be downloaded for free or purchased on a CD/DVD with support for $59.99. This is a really nice version of Linux that includes Mono and over 1,500 applications, including a number of Mono-based programs and XGL, the new 3D windowing package for Linux. You can see an example of XGL and other SUSE 10.1 screen shots at www.tuxmachines.org/gallery/suse101. If you have a 64-bit AMD processor, you can download a 64-bit version of SUSE 10.1 and use all 64 bits without buying a new copy of Windows.

There is also a nice calendar application, MonoCalendar, modeled on the iCal application from Apple that runs on .NET Mono. It can be seen at www.monocalendar.com/.