MonoSpace Conference Announced

Scott Bellware has announced the MonoSpace Conference in Austin Texas on October 27-30th.

Scott has made a Call for Speakers:

The Monospace Conference is looking for teachers to give tutorials on the Mono framework, tools, languages, and platforms supported by Mono.

Some tutorials are aimed at .NET developers with little experience with operating systems other than Windows, and others are geared to experienced Mono developers with exposure to the various Mono platforms.

The tutorials are two hour to three hour interactive sessions that can be any combination of follow-along examples, labs, and lecture.

We're looking for tutorials on subjects such as Linux, Mac, Windows, web, desktop, servers, message queues, databases, iPhone, Android, Amazon's EC2, among others.

You can track the progress of the conference at the MonoSpace Conf Blog.

You can also follow the progress on twitter.

Scott was one of the founders of the Alt.Net series of conferences.

Some Cool Mono Announcements

Yesterday we shipped Mono 2.4.2, our long-term supported version of Mono. It ships Microsoft's opensourced ASP.NET MVC stack for the first time (you could get it before on your own, but now it is integrated) and fixes over 150 reported bugs.

Chris Toshok announced M/Invoke a tool to port applications that use P/Invokes on Win32 to Linux and MacOS.

What Chris does not talk about on his post is that he was trying to use some .NET software that interfaces via USB to his glucose meter and was trying to get this to run on Linux. The tool is mostly .NET with the usual handful of P/Invokes to Win32. And this is how M/Invoke was born: a tool to retarget P/Invoke happy applications into becoming pure managed applications.

This opens new doors to forcefully port more apps to Linux.

Alan McGovern released a new version of Mono.Nat one of the libraries used by MonoTorrent.

Jordi Mas released a new version of Mistelix a DVD authoring tool for Linux:

Jordi's GBrainy brain teaser game was picked up by MoLinux, a regional Linux distribution, and shipped it translated to Spanish:

Joe Audette's mojoPortal was being installed four times as much when it got included in in Microsoft's Web Platform Installer site (more stats here).

For years I have loved the Joel on Software rules for software engineering. And one of those rules is "Build in one step". We have not always succeeded, but we have always tried. Lluis delivers the one step to build and run for MonoDevelop on Windows: Load solution, Hit F5, up and running.

Google Chrome really lead the way here, and I want very badly to have all of Mono building in Visual Studio with one keystroke, but we are not there yet.

Stephane reports on some nice startup performance improvements for F-Spot. Loading time for 10 images from Stephane's own image collection went from 1.2 seconds to .5 seconds.

MonoDevelop got some enhanced support for autoconf integration.

Jeremy Laval released another version of ZenComic a desktop Comic reader:

David Siegel announced a new release of Gnome Do on behalf of the Gnome Do team. In particular, it is now easier to write "Docklets" for the Gnome Do panel and for those of us that like the Emacs keybindings, it is now possible to use C-N and C-P for navigation

And of course the Google Summer of Code is in full swing:

And we have various very exciting projects brewing.

Jonathan Pobst has been exploring integration points for Mono and Visual Studio 2010:

Guadec: I will sadly not be attending the Guadec/Akademy conference in Canaria next week. This is going to be a busy summer for us as we are shipping a lot of code in the next few months: Moonlight 2.0, Mono for Visual Studio, MonoTouch 1.0 and Mono 2.6.

Mono

PhyreEngine, Mono, cool Mono uses in Gaming, and more.

Last week there was a little Mono surprise. It can be found on this Novell-hosted web page web page (scroll a little bit).

It has been a few very busy weeks at Novell's Eastern Research and Development Facility (Novell NERD Facility) here in Cambridge and we have been incredibly busy polishing some nice toys.

A few weeks ago we learned about Sony's developer event in the West Coast. Michael, Zoltan and myself worked very hard to put together a demo to show the virtues of C# and the CIL to developers. So we cranked on some record time some code:

• PhyreEngine#
• Static compiler for PowerPC for Mono on PS3
• A yield-based co-routine framework.

We picked Sony's PhyreEngine to demostrate how to use Mono to write the high-level code for a game using Sony's finely tuned engine. We figured this was better than showing a for loop printing the numbers 1 to 10 on the screen.

PhyreEngine# wraps PhyreEngine using the same techniques that we used in Gtk# and Moonlight. The resulting API is glorious and by letting PhyreEngine do all the heavy lifting while driving all the high-level from C# there is no way of telling that the driving force is not C++. All you get is pure unadultered productivity.

To make our demos a little more interesting, Michael wrote a minimalistic yield-based co-routine framework inspired by some of the ideas that our friend Lucas gave us. It is a tiny toy, but we used it to illustrate the concept of using C# iterators as the foundation for game logic development and how a cooperative scheduler would work (Unity game logic works just like this).

We were also working on completing Mono's port to the PlayStation 3's native operating system (this is different than running Mono on Linux on the PS3: that already works, and it was used for developing CellDotNet, a JIT for the PS3's SPUs). Zoltan developed the static compiler for PowerPC and I did the platform support.

Mono can now run "Hello World" on the PS3 native OS. There are still lots of ins, lots of outs and lots of whathaveyous that need to be tied up before this fully works and before we are able to run PhyreEngine# on the PS3.

Developing Cross Platform application with MonoDevelop

Yesterday Lluis announced the last missing piece from our strategy to make MonoDevelop a full cross-platform IDE: MonoDevelop now runs on Windows as well:

When we started the planning for MonoDevelop 2.2, the major goal of that release was to get feature parity on Linux, MacOS and Windows.

We want to grow the community of developers that contribute to MonoDevelop and we wanted to attract add-in developers that wanted to bring their IDE extensions to all three platforms.

MonoDevelop has recently been getting some nice community contributed plugins like Flash/Flex development support, Vala language support, Mono debugger for OSX (thanks to the nice folks at Unity for this!), VI editing mode and of course our own Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC add-ins.

My theory is that supporting MonoDevelop on all the three major operating systems will have a multiplication effect in terms of contributions to MonoDevelop: it will help both users and will enable developers that extend MonoDevelop with add-ins to reach more users.

I secretly want Unity to adopt MonoDevelop as the code editor for Unity; for the FlashDevelop guys on Windows to adopt MonoDevelop as their cross-platform foundation (their users want a cross platform Flashdevelop); for Flashbang to bring their UnityScript framework to MonoDevelop

Developing an add-in for MonoDevelop now brings your enhancements to a much larger community.

Look and Feel

Although the IDE is built using Gtk#, but we are aware that developers want to get things integrated with their operating system as much as possible. This is why we have invested in properly integrating MonoDevelop with the Mac and Windows.

The Look of MonoDevelop still has a heavy feel of the Linux Gtk+, but we are bluring the lines by making the theme and style match the operating system. Development in Gtk native themes will also continue to improve things.

Feel wise, we make MonoDevelop follow the conventions of the host platform. For example, on the Mac, MonoDevelop uses the Mac system menu, it uses an entirely different keybinding style that follows what every Mac developer expects (Command-KEY operations that match X-Code for example) and even text selection in the editor behaves differently:

More work will come, because we want MonoDevelop to feel native on each platform.

On Windows for example, MonoDevelop runs on top of the .NET Framework and uses the .NET managed debugger instead of using Mono's runtime and Mono's debugger, so there is no dependency on Mono to be installed on the system.

Moonlight 2 Preview 3

Another week of excellent work on the Moonlight universe and we bring you our Preview 3 release of Moonlight. Alan McGovern said it best though.

This week stats:

This is what the Silverlight Toolkit Sample page looked with Preview 2:

Moonlight 2 Preview 2

This is what the Silverlight Toolkit page looks with Preview 3:

Moonlight 2 Preview 3

You should be able to update directly from Firefox, or if you are trying it for the first time, go to our http://go-mono.com/moonlight-preview/ page.

Now, although Preview 2 was able to run the IronPython mini-Web IDE I am still going to try to pass that as a new feature.

And now you can try the IronPython mini-Web IDE!

Three Melon's Quest for R2-D2

I had the honor to meet the Three Melon developers at Unity's party this year at the Game Developer Conference. Three Melons is an Argentinian-based company that builds online games, and most recently they have been using Unity to build their new online games.

Today they just announced that their latest online game powered by Unity and Mono. "Quest for R2-D2" is now live at Lego.com:

Pato Jutard, co-founder of Three Meleons announced the launch and posted the Making of Lego Star Wars game by Three Melons:

Congratulations to the Three Melon developers for their launch!

You can follow them on twitter.

Moonlight 2 Preview 2

As we promised last week (threatened?) now that the foundation for Moonlight 2 is in place, we will be doing weekly releases for folks to try out, and to increase the feedback that we have received.

Thanks to everyone that provided bug reports and contacted us about the problems with last week's preview. In particular the issue affecting Ubuntu and SLED 10 users has been fixed and the plugin should work.

If you installed Moonlight already, you can update either by restarting Firefox or by following these steps:

Click "Find Updates":

Micro Focus Video

My friend Stephen sent me an interesting video they just cooked up at Micro Focus giving some hints as to what is coming up on the keynote of Micro Focus Live.

They recently bought Borland.

Video: Micro Focus Live Developers Keynote.

Developing Silverlight Apps on Linux and MacOS with Moonlight

Earlier this week I promised I would blog about how to build Silverlight apps in Linux. Michael beat me to this and did a couple of screencasts.

In Moonlight Development in Linux with MonoDevelop he walks us through the steps necessary to install the Moonlight SDK on top of Mono 2.4 and using MonoDevelop to create your app. Once you get these installed, here is how you get started with development:

MonoDevelop will provide auto-complete for the Silverlight APIs and also provide auto-complete in XAML files.

In addition to Linux, you can also use MonoDevelop on OSX to do the same thing. We shipped Moonlight's SDK as part of the MonoDevelop/OSX release, the result runs with Microsoft's Silverlight.

Michael again talks about it and produced a nice screencast:

I, for one, welcome our new SH4 embedded overlords.

ST Microelectronics, the maintainers of GCC-CIL (the GCC code generator backend that produces ECMA CIL bytecodes for Mono/.NET) have announced their port of Mono to the SH4 platform.

The code is currently available from http://code.google.com/p/mono-sh4/.

In addition to the MIPS64 port that I mentioned last week from SiCortex/nIX is now being merged into Mono's repository.

MIPS apparently is not only used in super computers, but apparently is also powering $169 dollar netbooks.

Innovation

Dana Blankenhorn comments on the the Moonlight 2.0 release and says:

It's the kind of open source success story Microsoft wants publicized. Microsoft innovates, open source copies.

It's not the kind of open source story open source needs, however.

What open source needs is real innovation, created by teams who may or may not represent Microsoft's fierce competitors. This can be hard to deliver, and Microsoft would like us all to know resistance in this case is futile.

A few points.

First: Moonlight's core is designed to ensure that Linux users get access to content that is produced for Silverlight on the web.

This is about making sure that Linux (and for that matter any other system where Moonlight can be compiled) does not become a second class citizen on the web.

Folks will argue all day whether the Silverlight model is the right one; whether it is gaining adoption; whether it is necessary; whether it is part of the open web.

But none of that matters when trying to access content on Linux: it is either possible to use it, or not. And having a working relationship with Microsoft allows us to bring it to Linux.

Second: Dana is looking in all the wrong places for innovation. If he wants to see my team's work that deviates from the set of APIs that Microsoft has created, he could look at our work on SIMD; our interactive C#; Static compilation technology to support things like the iPhone; our cross platform MonoDevelop (Linux, OSX, Windows); Our Gtk# API for building the above; He could look at all of our Mono.* classes, or all of the libraries and APIs produced by our community (Mono.Addins, Mono.Nat, Mono.ZeroConf, BitSharp, Cecil, CocoaSharp, MonoObjc, Crimson, and some forty others; I just got tired of going through the list here and here).

All of these created to solve a particular problem with the tools that we had on the platform we used.

Or for that matter, even reading the announcements on my blog.

Or he could look elsewhere in the vast universe of open source projects for ideas that match his definition of innovation. Not everything that is built in the open source world has to be about innovating in a completely new direction.

Third, and most important one: The definition of Innovation.

Innovation

Most people that discuss innovation have not even bothered to actually think about what this means in the first place. And I am particularly bothered when people claim that open source does not innovate, but can only copy.

Google's define:innovation is a good starting point.

Are Ideas Innovations? Everyone has ideas, even great ideas. Every day you go to lunch, every day you are taking a shower, every day you are walking alone and thinking you are having new ideas.

You can have a million ideas, and these might be innovative, but if they do not reach the world, did they matter?

For an idea or an innovation to have a practical effect, they need to go beyond the discussion at the lunch table with your friends and become a reality.

Bringing an Idea to Life Once I sit down and turn my idea into an actual tangible result there are a number of hurdles in my path.

The idea must be good enough for people to try out, I must get it distributed, and I must get people to use it.

Being first versus being to market first: It does not matter that many great ideas originate in the open source world or at the lunch table with your friends. You must bring the ideas to the public and the public must be in a position to adopt it.

For instance, Compaq/Digital were showing portable MP3 players based on Linux years before the iPod took the world by storm. Yet, nobody remembers these devices anymore and Apple gets the credit for bringing digital audio to the masses.

Or tagging and searching your email. GMail uses it today, but few people remember that the idea had been implemented before in Digital's Pachyderm.

Many ideas might originate as personal prototypes or even open source prototypes, but without a distribution channel and an ecosystem that would sustain the innovation many of those ideas exist merely to be replaced by folks in a better position to market/distribute it.

Claiming "I had the idea first" or "we were the first ones" is of little consolation if someone out-executes and out-markets you.

Definitions of Innovation: Wikipedia (as of 10 seconds ago) defines Innovation as:

The term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

I also like this one (from Google's define: too):

Innovation is the process that translates knowledge into economic growth and social well-being. It encompasses a series of scientific, technological, organizational, financial and commercial activities.

I think that Moonlight fits this definition perfectly well in that case.

Moonlight and Innovation

Sure, we do follow the APIs that Microsoft set for Silverlight.

But we have innovated in a number of ways:

• We innovate in the development process: we are an open source project, taking contributions and consuming other open source components.

  We dogfood other FOSS components, and we iterate to improve them.

  In 1999, the MIT Technology Review magazine named me the innovator of the year. In the award ceremony, Bob Metcalfe said that I was receiving the award for the work on Gnome, not because Gnome was a ground-breaking system, but because the goals and processes of Gnome were.

• We innovate in our cross-platform stance: Moonlight runs on more platforms (although admittedly, with a smaller market share than Windows and MacOS).
• We had out-of-browser support before Silverlight did: Sure it was trivial, but we had it before (see above note on futility of claiming "we were here first").
• Working with Microsoft: Ok, this is a bit of a stretch to claim as innovation, but here it goes: I am very proud that we are finding ways of working with a company that for many years resisted Linux and open source as well as helping Microsoft with all of its inertia become more open source friendly.
• Update: Mats on the comments points out something that I wish I had thought of when I wrote this: "Innovation is also, and I'd say mostly if history teaches us anything, about building and improving upon ideas - not just making new ones from scratch."

We (the Mono/Moonlight team) are not Dana's beacon of revolutionary change. But it is no secret that we are fans of the CLI virtual machine, and we believe that giving developers this platform will help them turn their ideas into innovations by giving them the best technologies available.

Users of Mono and Moonlight have already demonstrated that they have way better ideas than I have ever had. And they already have used Mono in brilliant ways. Dana might want to check my blog more periodically to take note of those innovations.

Mono talk at the Beantown.NET Users Group

Tomorrow, Joseph, Michael, Gonzalo and myself will be talking at the Beantown.NET Users Group about Mono, Moonlight and MonoDevelop at 6pm.

If you are in the Boston area, come join us for these open source festivities at Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge.

MonoDevelop on MacOS X

Good news for all OSX users, a build of MonoDevelop that integrates with OSX is now available:

MonoDevelop OSX-ified.

For the impatient among you, click and run MonoDevelop.app.zip.

It requires Mono 2.4 for OSX, on the upside, you can use this to develop ASP.NET MVC apps on the Mac.

Some Background

Back in February I showed a screenshot of MonoDevelop 2.0 for the Mac, it looked like this:

Super-Alpha-Preview of MonoDevelop on OSX.

It was basically the Gtk# based MonoDevelop IDE binary executing on the Mac. There was no porting involved, just the same executable running under Mono/OSX. The code works, but it did not feel like a Mac app:

• The Menu bar was embedded in the window.
• The keyboard accelerators were the Linux ones. They felt unnatural for OSX users, and also did not take advantage of the spare key (Command) to liberate the control key for other uses.
• The editor behaved like a Linux editor.

There is a vibrant Mono on OSX community out there, and it will only grow larger. We wanted to make sure that all of the work that is going into creating a great IDE is available for folks on the Mac in a way that is actually comfortable to use.

So working with folks in the Mac Community and with folks at Unity Michael has been working on tuning up MonoDevelop on the Mac to become an editor that does not get in the way of Mac users and developers and integrates better from the "feel" perspective with other tools in the OS.

For instance, not only does the new MonoDevelop for MacOS use the Mac menu bar, and the Mac accelerators (a combination of XCode and Textmate accelerators), but even the text editor has been altered to support the way selection and navigation works on the Mac.

I figured that for every 100 users of MonoDevelop one of them will contribute patches back to the effort. If you happen to be that 1% hacker that will contribute back, you might want to look at a list of ideas to improve MonoDevelop on the Mac.

MonoDevelop on Windows.

MonoDevelop on Windows is on a similar boat: the 2.0 release works "out of the box" on Windows, but again, it is a GNOME IDE in a Windows land.

Stay tuned for news from the MonoDevelop community as to what will happen there.

Update: Lluis posted an update on the progress of MonoDevelop on Windows.

Smooth Streaming with Moonlight

I never tested Smooth Streaming before, just the more basic media tests, but the Smooth Streaming stack is running with our Moonlight preview:

You can see a few rendering glitches for the controls on the screen. But this is really good news for our new media pipeline.