OOXML: The Wins

by Miguel de Icaza

Regardless of where you stand on the outcome of OOXML becoming an ISO standard, it is worth pointing out that the opposition to OOXML pushed Microsoft into more open directions.

If you are sulking because OOXML was approved, it is worth looking at what actually was accomplished since December of 2005 when the process begun.

Before OOXML came to ISO and the global review of it begun:

  • Microsoft moving away from their proprietary file formats to open, and XML-based (easier to manipulate, produce and consume) file formats.
  • Novel raised a record number of issues on the specification, many of which were solved before the spec was approved by ECMA.
  • About 700 pages worth of descriptions for the formula specifications (one of the major issues from our end when we joined ECMA TC45 in December of 2005).
  • The OOXML specification placed under the OSP.

Once OOXML went for discussion at ISO, a number of good things came out and are major community wins:

1. The specifications for the old binary file formats were published under the OSP (February of 2008).

2. The above documents were backed up by the British Library in case Microsoft ever stops publishing them (announcement).

3. Microsoft is funding the development of a translator between the old binary file formats and OOXML which should assist folks that have experience in one format and want to understand the other, or just want to convert documents back and forth. If your app lacked support for OOXML, but had support for the old formats, you can use these tools.

4. Microsoft agreed that future versions of OOXML will be covered by the OSP a concern that some people had about future versions of the document.

5. Microsoft pledged to modify future versions of Office to implement the ISO version of OOXML.

6. working group was created to look into harmonization of OOXML and ODF, something that many developers involved in office suites have been advocating for a long time.

7. Microsoft pledged to support features to support other file formats as native file formats in their office suite:

Last year we sponsored a translator project that gave people the ability to read and write ODF files from Microsoft Office. Last month we announced that we would update the Office product so that the ODF translators could natively plug into Office and give people the same options they get from the other file formats. People will be able to set ODF as the default format in Office if that's what they want by simply installing the translators and then changing their settings.

8. Lots of clarifications went into the spec, and people should be happy about that.

9. And finally, now that OOXML is an ISO standard, as Patrick Durusau implied there are many winners.

Anyways, I wanted to keep this short and uplifting, this seems like a win for everyone all around.

Preemptive-reply-to-the-above-paragraph: I will not reply/approve any flames, FUD or half-truths.

Posted on 02 Apr 2008


I love Reddit Captions

by Miguel de Icaza

Posted on 28 Mar 2008


OOXML, looking forward

by Miguel de Icaza

I have been reading the OOXML storm in a teacup for more than a year now. Am looking forward to the approval of OOXML as an ISO standard and to be able to move the discussion back to the things that actually matter: free and open source software.

For a year, countless bytes have been wasted on what is now a very difficult plot to follow, specially for people that have not followed it since the start (or as Bill Maher said last week "Its like trying to make sense of a LOST episode". Note: am a Lost fan).

When we go back to what matters, we should be ready to ask IBM to open source its Lotus Notes software based on Open Office (as staunch supporters of open formats, and open source, I think its in their best interest to do so). There are nice components in Lotus Notes that would be nice to integrate into the upcoming OpenOffice 3.

But most importantly, it is a time for all of those strong advocates of open standards to stop talking, and start walking. I look forward for all that energy that went into discussing the pros and cons of OOXML to join an open source project and start contributing code, documentation, support, create support forums, file good bug reports and help us make free and open source software better.

In case you have not been noticing, Apple is gaining market share on the desktop. Some of our own kernel hackers, desktop hackers, web hackers that used to be Linux or BSD users are flocking to the proprietary OSX.

We need to change that, lets reverse that trend, and lets focus on what actually matters: the free and open source desktop. To make this happen we will need all the help that we can get.

Punditry and lobbying will not get us very far, real work will.

Posted on 26 Mar 2008


Mono: 2008 Google Summer of Code

by Miguel de Icaza

The Mono project will be participating once again in the Google Summer of Code.

Although some ideas from various teams are available in our student projects page this year, I want to encourage students to feel free to submit ideas that they think should be done with Mono.

In past years, a handful of students suggested their own ideas as to what would be an interesting project to work on during the summer, we liked those and turned those into full fledged projects.

Feel free to suggest a project that you think would be useful to the Mono community, and to discuss your idea with us in the Mono Summer of Code IRC channel: #monosoc on irc.gnome.org

Posted on 24 Mar 2008


Documentation: Generics and CSS

by Miguel de Icaza

Mono contributor Jonathan has been hard at work and has added support for Generics to Monodoc as well as importing the ECMA documentation for the new generic APIs.

Monodoc now also support man pages (we have a handful now, and we will later add all the mono ones) and we now render using a CSS stylesheet instead of the collection of gross hacks that we used to have.

Check the new docs out.

Posted on 24 Mar 2008


Pastor Wright

by Miguel de Icaza

From Dave Winer's blog:

Melroy Hodge, from Queens, NY, a contact on Twitter, sent a pointer to a YouTube video of a longer excerpt of Jeremiah Wright's post-911 sermon, one of the speeches that soundbites were shown repeatedly on cable news this week. I guess it's not surprising that the cable news excerpts gave a very misleading impression. (Next time this happens we must do an immediate fact-check.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ

This is a must-watch video. Stop what you're doing, right now, and watch it.

I found myself captivated by Wright's ideas and the way he expresses them.

I agree with everything he said.

I would have been willing to cut him some slack, because this was less than a week after the attack, and those were crazy days, who knew what was coming next. But he was right, we have done what they did to us, and we're doing it again in Iraq. The US was led by despotic people and we followed; we wanted to punish someone, anyone, and it didn't matter if they had anything to do with what happened to us. And we did.

Read the whole post from Dave Winer's blog. The video as he says, is a must-watch.

Also, from the twitter-o-sphere:

Posted on 22 Mar 2008


Dog Whisperer

by Miguel de Icaza

We became fans of the Dog Whisperer TV show from the Discovery Channel in the past few months. Sadly, we are unable to have a dog at home, so we might look for a new place.

My friend Shelly pointed me to Gladewell's article on the New Yorker about Cesar Milan, just as fun and interesting as watching the show.

Posted on 22 Mar 2008


OOXML SDK

by Miguel de Icaza

Microsoft is working on a OOXML SDK for managed languages. They have announced a roadmap:

Being selfish here, I would love to see this SDK relreased under an MS-PL license myself, I think it would be great to get folks outside of the Windows world consume and produce OOXML files easily.

This is a win-win for everyone. Microsoft gets more products consuming and producing OOXML documents on the Windows and MacOS worlds through Mono, and we get a great API to use on Linux with .NET languages.

Although I have emailed a few friends, am not sure am reaching the right people inside Microsoft. I would love to discuss the advantages that MS-PLing the code base would have.

It has to be under a license like the MS-PL as opposed to just a license to use and distribute on Linux for this code to make it and be distributed eventually into Linux distributions.

Posted on 22 Mar 2008


Mono Debugger, now with 2.0 support

by Miguel de Icaza

Last week, Martin Baulig announced that the debugger in trunk adds supports to many 2.0 features, our last major feature missing in the debugger.

The biggest news is that the debugger now has support for C# 2.0
features such as generics, anonymous methods and iterators:

  * We can currently print fields in generic instances, print their
    types and parent classes.

  * Recursive generic types (see test/src/TestRecursiveGenerics.cs for
    an example) are supported, but need more testing.

  * There is some limited support for method invocations, but we can't
    get their types yet.

  * Support for anonymous methods and iterators should now be pretty
    much complete; we can fully access captured variables etc.

To try out the updated debugger in trunk, you must use Mono from trunk. With this code in place, we have now started the work to integrate it into MonoDevelop.

MonoDevelop 1.1 (due in six months) will have support for the debugger.

Remote Debugging

Additionally, Harald announced that they have modified the Mono Debugger to support remote debugging (useful for debugging embedded systems for instance).

They wrote a detailed document on the architecture for their remote debugging framework.

Their work is now licensed under the MIT X11 license, which will allow us to integrate this directly into the Mono and Mono Debugger distributions.

Posted on 19 Mar 2008


MonoDevelop 1.0 has been Released

by Miguel de Icaza

After a few years in the oven, we are ready to announce the first release of MonoDevelop. Lluis has put together a set of in-depth release notes that covers the major features available in MonoDevelop and links to various tutorials and screencasts as well as extensive screenshots of what is available in MonoDevelop 1.0.

MonoDevelop 1.0 is designed mostly for Linux developers creating Gnome and ASP.NET applications but MonoDevelop is also available for MacOS users that download our Mono installer and will still be useful if they are building Mono-based applications on OSX.

The IDE has many of the features that you would expect from a modern IDE for Mono: support for programming in multiple languages, an extensible design, editors and designers for ASP.NET and Gnome applications, integration with Unix toolchains and Visual Studio Solutions, support for source code control and following standard Unix development practices, integrated NUnit testing, Unix Packaging and Deployment (following the GNU conventions, and Mono conventions for libraries and packages), internationalization and localization, tools to maintain your project documentation and command line tools to access this functionality.

We have some pretty good language support in this release: C#, VisualBasic.NET, Java, C and C++. Check the previous link for the details as to how extensive the support is for each feature.

Some screencasts:

There is more documentation on MonoDevelop available as well.

The Early MonoDevelop History.

In late 2003, a few developers were looking for an IDE to write C# code in Linux, not something too fancy, but something that would provide Intellisense features.

Windows developers were used to Visual Studio, and Mike Krueger and the developers at Alpha Sierra Papa had created the very successful SharpDevelop project, a .NET Windows.Forms-based application. At the time, Mono did not have a working Windows.Forms implementation (it would take another three years before our official 1.0 release of Windows.Forms) so this ruled.

Although there had been an attempt to make SharpDevelop portable by Mike (with a variation on the theme of Eclipse's toolkit) this effort had not been completed, and SharpDevelop continued to be a Windows.Forms application.

Pedro Abelleira first extracted the editor and intellisense engine from SharpDevelop into a standalone component that rendered using Gtk# instead of Windows.Forms. This was back late in 2003. Initially it was only going to be a text editor.

Development started mostly on irc and quickly contributors started to porting various other pieces from SharpDevelop or rewriting the GUI components with Glade and Gtk#. By late 2003 Todd Berman had taken over the maintenance duties of MonoDevelop and sent me a email on December 31st:

Oh, and we are shooting for eating our own MonoDevelop dog food by the end of this coming weekend, and it looks like we will be there even before then.

History of the GUI Designers

As regular Gnome developers were were very happy using Glade and Gtk#'s [Widget] attributes to bind the XML GUI representation to our own variables. You double clicked on the .glade file, and Glade would launch from within MonoDevelop, you would tweak your UI, save it, and rerun from MonoDevelop.

Around this time Dan Winship from the desktop team started working on a new GUI designer for Gnome, the Stetic GUI designer. This was a Gtk#-based GUI designer, and the idea is that this could be embedded in other applications. An early screencast of Stetic capabilities is available here:

Stetic in March 2005.

Work continued, but Dan eventually moved on to other projects. By the end of 2005 we were looking at integrating a GUI designer directly into MonoDevelop and Stetic was not ready to do that, so instead Lluis integrated Glade-3 into MonoDevelop:

MonoDevelop with Glade-3, January 2006

This project did not live for too long. Glade-3 had to be patched, and we quickly realized that all the features that we wanted would require more than trivial changes to Glade-3. So we decided that instead of investing time in the C code base and the bridge to C#, that we would complete Stetic which was entirely written in C#, this is what it looks like today:

Stetic Designer inside MonoDevelop.

A complete screencast of Stetic and today's MonoDevelop integration shows all the work that Lluis and his team did to provide a smooth editing experience.

Today MonoDevelop not only supports forms design, but it also provides menu and toolbar editors and support for managing your icon collection in your application.

Menu editor

A key feature of .NET is the creation of reusable components. Lluis brought this to MonoDevelop and the stetic editor. This screencast shows how to create widget libraries with MonoDevelop and Stetic that you can later reuse in your projects or in other projects.

The Future

The team has already started work on the next release of MonoDevelop, version 1.1. Our goal is to release new versions of MonoDevelop every six months. To do this, we are planning on doing all of the disruptive changes on branches, and always keep our HEAD revision stable.

There are a number of incremental improvements on our task list, but also some exciting new features. There were many things that we could not get in time for 1.0 are being incorporated or implemented since the 1.0 tree branched a few months ago. Some of the new features that trunk users or alpha testers can get include:

New Managed Editor: The text editor is now entirely managed and has many new features like configurable keybindings (Really nice Emacs keybindings), split windows, Emacs/Firefox-like incremental search on a toolbar (no more annoying dialog box popping up in the middle of your source code) and one of the most requested features: region folding.

Moving to a fully managed widget written in C# gives us a lot of flexibility to improve the editor. This is a theme that was consistent in the 1.0 release, moving from Glade to Stetic and moving from the GdlDock to our own managed dock paid off every time in terms of developer agility and features that we could implement.

ASP.NET editor: new improvements will provide auto-complete and intellisense while editing .aspx files. Also, with the maturity of WebKit/Gtk we are hoping to replace Mozilla as the GUI editor for ASP.NET pages with this.

Integrated Debugging: Currently the Mono Debugger is only available as a command line tool. Our next release of MonoDevelop will provide debugging directly from the IDE.

Windows Port: There is now a Windows profile release of MonoDevelop. This will be great for developers that are building applications using Gtk# on Windows and want to get access to the Stetic GUI designer which currently requires them to use Linux to do this. It is not our intention to compete with SharpDevelop as an open source IDE for Windows Programmers although there might be some overlap.

msbuild-based model: We want to move to the Visual Studio build model to improve interoperability with Visual Studio, Blend and SharpDevelop and other tools that use msbuild files as their interoperability layer. This will allow developers to easily move across tools to work on different parts of a project.

XML Editor: A backport from SharpDevelop's XML editor has been integrated.

Future versions of MonoDevelop will extend on this feature set an integrate Ivan's Windows.Forms designer, Alan's Silverlight designer and improve Michael's ASP.NET designer.

Posted on 14 Mar 2008


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