Yesterday I was pondering whether I should go to Lang.NET 2009 and unable to make a decision, I ran an online poll and asked people to vote on twitter:

In my survey I listed the pros and cons to give people a feeling of what I was up against.

The first couple of votes were not very helpful, I got 2 votes, one said yes, one said no.

Then another twenty or so votes came and the balance started to shift towards "go". Here is the final result:

And then something very strange happened, the comment section for the online poll started getting people's opinion in the form of poems or Haikus.

I copy pasted some of the poems below:

In my heart you will always be now in heaven i cant wait again to see

When I decided not to roam
I just stayed home
Got a lot done
Enjoyed some time in the sun

---

Listen to good talks with your friends
Before all the fun ends!

Catch up and learn about Google's V8
--Maybe you'll even get a date!

You should go because it will be a blast
Life is short, so make it last!

---

a haiku for miguel:

Improve your cv
Boston is lovely right now
Drink with nerdy folks

---

I can’t make up my mind.
I really am in a bind.
I can go to Lang dot net,
And my day will be set.
Or stay at home and work,
Like a common store clerk.
This choice will be easy.
Lang is where I will be.

Should I stay,
or should I go?
For every con,
there is a pro.

I could see old friends,
and make some new.
Or stay at home,
and get work done too.

I could learn about Second Life,
and Google's V-8.
And actually accruing miles
would really be great.

It would take a whole week.
And delay my work,
But learning something new
Is definitely a perk.

A programmer I am,
and a programmer I will be.
I think this great poem
made my mind up for me.

---

New friends
Old friends
Learning new things
And when you get back to Boston
You can have some baked beans

---

destroyer of days seven
bringer of travel expenses
Lang.NET

provider of lectures
connector of colleagues
Lang.NET

delayer of projects
impeder of family time
Lang.NET

programmer of dynamic C#
granter of Second Life
Lang.NET

Why go across the country to have a v8?
Because that's what .NET is 4.
Lang.NET

---

Kill time
or make new friends?
Lose a little time from work
or catch up with those you've fallen out of touch with?
Work can always wait Miguel
opportunity cannnot.

---

Another dollar for yet another day,
That is what they all used to say.
For Lang.NET 2009 I pine away
The cost to do it makes me say “Hey!”
Give me Second Life with which to play
If only I could go to the conference that way
I’d program it if C was their programming thang’

---

Let me help Miguel on what to do.
He's undecided...can't decide between the two.
If he goes to Lang. NET, work at home will pile high.
If he stays home to work, perhaps he'd cry.
He'd miss the chance to learn Second Life,
Or make new friends, maybe even find a wife!

So it costs a few bucks to get to there.
He'd blow it on something else other than air fare!
Make the reservations today and don't delay.
You'll have a good time....that's what I say!

---

Divided I stand
The opportunity to advance ahead
A week of talks and new friends await me
On my way to Lang.NET 2009.

One week gone,
Trekking across the country.
Putting all tasks aside,
I delay work
On my way to Lang.NET 2009.

In the end,
The journey made
Is better than the journey dreamed.

---

Oh the choice, to go or to stay
that is Miguel's question of the day!

Should he go, he would have a great time
Should he stay...he might save a dime!

Going he will learn about new things out there
Staying he might...get more work done fair.

The choice looks easy to someone like me
but then again I'm not Miguel....I'm Susie

---

Once when Miguel was feeling weak,
A conference looked to kill his week.
But opportunity there it seemed was rife:
A chance to master Second Life!

---

Miguel's Dilemma
Should I stay or should I go
The trip could be for not
But my gut says I should go
Money,work,time and home
Oh, well bye bye I go.....

---

knowledge is calling me to fill him up
my friends are quite expecting
there are also some guys I don't know that i have to spy on

who cares about work!
who cares if I hitchhike to Lang.Net!

home will always wait
across the country I will enlighten myself

---

To Lang.NET or not to Lang.NET ... that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler to learn about great stuff
Like Second Life and dynamic C#,
Or consider it the death of
An entire week away from home,
Thereby missing out on the catching up with old friends.
What value, then, shall be given
This knowledge and friendship?
Is it greater than the cost of transport and per diem?
Only Miguel can truly tell.

---

Lang.NET
Lang.NET
Oh this decision should not make you fret

Think about the things that are great
Second Life! .NET 4 and Google V8!

These things are worth the week away
your delay in work, and your hit in pay

Think about the old friends you'll greet
And all the new ones that you will meet

The knowledge base you'll gain and learn
will help you back help you back home and what you earn

Lang.NET
Lang.NET
Looks like going is really your best bet.

---

Haiku:

While traveling sucks
Experience should be worthwhile
Go enjoy Lang.NET

---

There are times we can't resist
Pondering the things we've missed.
We vow, "Next time I won't be slow.
I'll just pick up myself and go.".
And when we're back, our money spent,
We often think, "I'm glad I went".

---

Lang.Net
Not a bad gig to get
Sure it's a road trip
And a work skip
A budget breaker
But 'cmon,
Ain't it grand to be a taker?

---

Lang.Net
Not a bad gig to get
Sure it's a road trip
And a work skip
A budget breaker
But 'cmon,
Ain't it grand to be a taker?

---

Miguel should fly cross country,
And not worry about the money.
The trip will be great,
You must learn about Google V8.

Leaving home for a week,
Does sound rather bleak,
But you'll chat with old pals,
And may meet some gals.

---

There is much to learn,
but conferences return.
If you stick to your guns,
keep your money in your pocket,

you'll have more in store
when next year rolls around.
So stand on solid ground!,
and in 2010 launch rocket.

Not quite sure why I got so many replies in the form of poems, and Google surveys do not track the IP address of the submissions, so I have no idea if these were all submitted by the same person or not.

Need to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Last year we did some work in Mono together with Luis Ortiz to support 64-bit arrays in the VM.

What was interesting about this work is that even though the ECMA standard allows the index of arrays to be a long .NET on Windows64 does not support this and Java would require modifications to the bytecode format. Altering Mono became the natural choice for those looking to host very large arrays in an advanced and managed VM.

This means that you can continue to use your existing tools to build applications, but when running under Mono you will get to use those arrays without that pesky 2,147,483,648 upper boundary.

Today Ian Dichkovsky (from N-iX)announced on the mailing list their work to bring Mono to the MIPS64 from SiCortex. This is based on the excellent work from Mark Mason that did the MIPS32 port.

SiCortex has an entry-level desktop computer with 72 MIPS processors and if you have the budget you can get modules with 5,832 processors. The MIPS processors helps them stay eco-friendly.

Telerik is one of the most famous provider of controls for .NET. We have been working for the past few months with Telerik to make sure that their RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX product worked out of the box with Mono:

Today Telerik announced the availability of their product officially for Mono-based customers on Linux systems. From their press release:

Telerik, the leading vendor of development tools and components for the Microsoft .NET platform announced that RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX fully supports the Mono runtime environment, an open source .NET framework sponsored by Novell, tailored for development of Linux applications. The Telerik AJAX UI components is the first major commercial user interface (UI) suite to go cross-platform and allows developers to build rich .NET applications in a Linux environment. “This has been a long-awaited feature, which we have been quietly working on for quite some time. Over the past few months, we have been actively testing the compatibility of our RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX offering with Mono", said Hristo Kosev, Telerik CTO. "We are extremely happy that our joint work with Novell will allow customers to build compelling high-performance ASP.NET AJAX-based applications and run them on Linux using Mono 2.4.” The decision to work with Novell to extend the capabilities of RadControls over other platforms is in direct response to customer feedback and interest in Mono. Telerik and Novell are optimistic about the effect their partnership will have on the industry and the benefits it will bring to .NET developers.

Telerik is a major player in the control space in the .NET world and many developers turn to them for ready to use controls for their applications. Developers that were previously using Telerik products can now host their products on Linux servers.

Special thanks go to Marek Habersack in the Mono team who worked tirelessly to fix Mono's ASP.NET stack. Working with the Telerik folks was a pleasure. Telerik helped us by providing us access to their source code, their test suite and their QA team that made sure that their thousands of tests ran equally well on Mono as they did on Microsoft's .NET.

You can try the Telerik controls running on Mono at http://mono.telerik.com/.

Michael Hutchinson blogs about how to use the recently open sourced ASP.NET MVC framework with MonoDevelop. Go from installing MonoDevelop 2.0 to your first ASP.NET MVC application 3 minutes:

There are a few very simple steps:

• Go to Tools/Add-in Manager.
• Click "Install Add-ins".
• In ASP.NET select "ASP.NET MVC".
• Install.
• Select File/New Solution
• Select ASP.NET MVC project.
• Hit F5 (run) to run your first app:

This will give you basic templates and dialog boxes for solutions, views, controllers and master pages. The code uses Michael's recent implementation of the T4 engine.

Check Michael's Blog for a complete step-by-step setup.

The Add-in bundles Microsoft's recently open sourced ASP.NET MVC engine to run on top of Mono 2.4.

Kudos to Michael that created this add-in in his copious spare time. And kudos to the MonoDevelop team that created such a pleasant platform to extend.

Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC is an extension built on the core of ASP.NET that brings some of the popular practices and ease of development that were popularized by Ruby on Rails and Django to the .NET developers.

Scott Guthrie ---the inventor of ASP.NET--- just announced that Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license:

I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. You can read the text of the MS-PL at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html

These are incredibly good news. Worth dancing for!

I know that a lot of developers inside Microsoft worked to get this important piece of code released under the MS-PL to ensure that the users of ASP.NET could benefit from the code being open source. I know that at least Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Dimitry Robsman, Rob Conery and Brian Goldfarb pushed for this.

I am psyched, not only because ASP.NET MVC is usable in Mono and the code is licensed under open source terms, but also because I strongly believe that the same innovation, rapid adoption and experimentation that has happened with the new wave of web stacks will come to ASP.NET MVC across all platforms.

The source code is available for download and we are hoping to integrate this into Mono shortly. Scott Hanselman has a nice blog entry on how ASP.NET MVC went from price-free to open-source free.

In Scott's PDF tutorial he discussed how to build applications with ASP.NET MVC using Visual Studio and how the Rails practices of not repeating yourself and convention over configuration are used by ASP.NET MVC.

We have developed a MonoDevelop add-in that provides a set of templates, dialog boxes and the tooling necessary to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC on Linux and MacOS X as well. Hopefully the experience will be very similar to Visual Studio.

It was only two weeks ago that we were sipping virgin pina coladas at Mix09:

Mono is quickly approaching having a complete implementation of the CoreCLR security model for Mono. This is being developed primarily for use in Moonlight.

This new and simplified security model allows Moonlight to download and execute untrusted code and run it inside a sandbox. A full implementation requires Mono to have an executable image verifier (making sure the binary that we download follows all of the rules and does not try some funny business), an IL verifier that ensures that the code does not contain any unsafe operations and the sandbox system that ensures that the downloaded code only calls methods that it has permission to call.

Click for passable illustration of how the sandbox works.

MSDN has a short introduction to the sandbox and I blogged a long list of links to the original blog entries that documented it.

CoreCLR security can be customized using a handful of attributes. Instead of sprinkling our source code with the attributes and a gazillions #ifdefs we are using our Mono Linker and a few tools and configuration files to reshape our libraries to contain the necessary attributes required to secure the sandbox. We use a number of tools to automate this process and a manual auditing process to audit the results.

This is cool because this is a much simpler sandbox system than CAS ever was and our tools make it very simple for third parties embedding Mono into their applications to create their own sandboxes and reshape what is allowed or not allowed by the sandbox based on their specific needs.

The bad news: this sandbox is only available from trunk right now and will not be easily available until Mono 2.6.

We just released two big projects we have been working on for quite a while.

Mono 2.4 is a much faster, scalable and tuned version of Mono, like you have never seen before. Major highlights from the previous release are documented in our release notes.

And MonoDevelop 2.0

And a brand new web site

I previously blogged about the list of all the new MonoDevelop 2.0 features. The most visible one is the integrated debugger both for Mono applications and for C-based applications (using GDB).

Dogfooding: In addition to all the nice features in MonoDevelop 2.0, Lluis migrated the web site for MonoDevelop from MediaWiki to the Mono-powered MindTouch Deki content management system.

I am heading out to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco as an attendee after some strong endorsments from some friends on tweeter.

If you are at the GDC or in San Francisco and would like to get together at some point drop me an email (miguel at gnome dot org). Or if there are any great hacker get-togethers for game developers, I would love to hang out with them.

I would not want to dissapoint, and as a one trick pony kind of person, I will likely be talking about Mono, Moonlight and the virtues of managed code to anyone willing to listen.

Looking forward to see what my friends have been up to. I can not wait to see the C# repl in a Unity/Web app.

As I mentioned on a previous post Silverlight 3 opens the doors for developers to plug their own Codecs into the Silverlight media pipeline.

Only a few hours later I read on twitter that Atsushi and Rolf has implemented not only the Ogg/Vorbis Codec for Silverlight 3, but also implemented the Silverlight 3 API in Moonlight:

This means that you can now use your Silverlight-based players to playback Ogg/Vorbis content. Theora and Dirac are still missing, but with the sample code that we now have, it is going to be merely a weekend hack to get it done. Fluendo has a nice implementation of both already in Java.

Update on May 6th, 2009: open source implementations of Dirac, Vorbis and adpcm now live in the mooncodecs module.

Update: link fixed.

You can see the sample in action in Atsushi's test page.

Like Jo said on IRC:

it also works on SL3 though. that's the bit that excites me, since it means we have proper cross-platform playback with Free codecs *today* working in most browsers that matter

In the words of Annie Hall: La de da.

Go Moonlight Go!

Burried in the list of what is new in Silverlight 3 there is this gem:

Extensible media format support: With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.

What the above means is that with Silverlight 3 in addition to the built-in codecs for VC-1 and H.264 and the built-in containers (ASF and MOV) developers can plug an arbitrary audio or video codec and containers into the pipeline to support other formats like Dirac, vorbis, theora and the OGG container.

Both the codecs and the container parsers are authored using C# (or any other .NET supported language).

It would be nice to use Mono.SIMD where appropriate for these codecs. Mono.SIMD works out of the box on .NET, but it is hardware accelerated in Mono.

Atsushi at Novell has done some of the work to get an old C#-based Vorbis codec working with Silverlight 3. We will post more details when we have more information (the fix is on SVN).