During the free softwaremeeting in Brasilia, we launched the Mono Brazil effort: a community of Brazilian hackers is creating a Portuguese community around Mono. This is an important step for the local community, just like the creation of Mono Hispano was.

In the meantime in Mono-land things keep moving, I logged into IRC recently, only to be bombarded with news about the progress in Mono-land: Windows.Forms widget rendering was re-structured to better match the rendering model. Plenty of bug fixes in this area, so you might want to get your mono-wine packages from the Mono site.

Duncan also contributed our Cairo bindings to System.Drawing (we previously were using Xr, and we have finally migrated to the new API). For those who want to use Cairo directly, we do provide a nice Cairo binding as well without using System.Drawing.

Atsushi Enomoto continues his work on the XML Schema validation. After watching the XML editor demo after Don's presentation, I am quite interested in seeing more smart XML editors based on this code. Although Conglomerate looks a lot nicer, it is very fragile (due to its C heritage ;-) and whatever is the language use to describe the graphical rendering is not simple.

Microsoft instead chose a different approach: instead of making a mapping from the XML schema to describe the rendering using the 2 or 3 level system used by Conglomerate, they have pluggable renderers into Visual Studio. So it is possible to provide custom editors or renderers for SVG files or well-known XML configuration files.

Lluis has got all the SourceGear regression tests running with Mono now, so I am sure Eric will be very pleased to see his product running on Linux (and soon on the Mac, as Paolo has been busily hacking on it)

Vladimir has been busily implementing a .NET version of the Internet Communications Engine: the new hip OO-RPC protocol in the world. Several of the people involved with CORBA contributed to the design of this vastly simplified and high-performance RPC system.

Gonzalo has got XSP to support multiple-applications. This means one thing: I am migrating my blog finally to ASP.NET, running side-by-side with the ASP.NET-based online Mono docs

Martin and Zoltan continue their bug hunting on the compiler, class libraries and runtime. Martin's debugger is also becoming more and more stable, but he wont get to work on it too much, as C# Generics await him ;-)

Yuri Astrakhan discovered Open Internationalization effort to create a data-base of all the things localizable/internationalizable that a framework needs to provide. Dick has been working on this based on some empty skeletons we created, but having real data files to work with will make our effort more interesting

Piers again impressed everyone with his Javascript skills: he implemented a lighter, more portable, less buggy Javascript dynamic tree, which can be seen on the mono docs site. Ben in the meantime helped me fix a few issues in Monodoc, in particular now we get a better hint on multiple matches for the same entry on the index, and he also implemented method grouping.

Porto Alegre

Been spending most of my time visiting friends and family of Laura in Porto Alegre. Also we have visited Marcelo and Suzana a few times at their place.