Mono Developments

Zoltan Varga has removed the big locks we had on the Mono runtime, and has replaced them with fine-grained locks using a lattice to describe the order in which the locks are to be obtained to avoid dead-lock situations. This was part of the thread safety audit on the Mono runtime engine.

Alp improved the UI of Monodoc, so it now looks a lot prettier:

Other changes in Monodoc during the past week include the display of extra information for matches, in this case, I selected the "ToString" method from the incremental search window, and a list of matches is displayed:

Johannes today contributed a patch to Mono's Windows.Forms that makes it track the Gtk theme colors; His new patch will also pick the default font settings. You can see it here.

Gonzalo in the meantime made me very happy with the changes to XSP (our ASP.NET server) that allow for multiple applications to be hosted on a single server. This finally will let me run all my web apps and web services under Apache.

The SharpWT team has a full C#-based version of SWT ready to run, and they have made tremendous progress on the toolkit in the last two weeks (working both on Windows and on Gtk+).

The Mono Brazil site is Up. It is TWiki based, but the content is there now.

Hip stuff

Today's hip thing is of course the text-mode Gtk+. I love this hack, and am puzzled by their effort to build a Midnight Commander-like program using it, but the pages are in Czech.

Chris Brumme's last post on his blog is also fascinating: many internal details about the CLR are exposed, but also, I am still quite surprised by the layering done by NT on their low-level loading interfaces, it seems too complicated when you contrast it with ELF file loading (seems to me like a backwards compatibility feature). Mono happily can avoid a lot of this, but for a price: they are today executing C++ code out of the box, we cant yet.

Michael Meeks is also showing off what seems to the uninformed viewer like a Gtk-like layout system for Open Office.

Guadec, and Linux at Work?

There are various cities in Europe that want to host the Guadec, and we can only host it in one place. I was thinking that maybe after Guadec, or before Guadec, the tutorial speakers for Guadec could tour Europe for a week or two, delivering tutorials on the various subjects: not really a tour aimed at Gnome developers, but aimed at users and developers interested in using the Gnome platform. Very much like what the Linux at Work folks do.

That has the advantage of getting Gnome better known in various places in Europe, but focusing our Guadec effort in a single city. What do you think? Mail me your thoughts.

Don: what is that cell phone of yours?

Don is going around with an absolutely hip SmartPhone running the .NET Framework, which am in love with. But after using all my internet browsing powers, I have failed to locate the model and provider for it. It seems to be available only in Europe.

If you run into Don, get him to mail me the information ;-)

Sao Paolo

Maria Laura and myself arrived to Sao Paolo. Tomorrow we will be visiting the Joao at the telecentros in the Favelas where they are using Gnome, Debian and Linux to operate those centers.