This week the Mono Novell hackers have met for the first time in Boston, and we have been discussing the various tasks that need to be completed for Mono 1.0 and 1.2. IRC has been relatively quiet, and the exchange of ideas and discussions in town have been great.
The good news: we are on schedule for the 1.0 release, with a very nice cushion to test things. The only areas that are going to be very close to the deadline are System.Data and System.Drawing.
We got a few folks explain their areas of work to the others (so far I attended the meetings on security, remoting and the debugging session).
Duncan has been leading the release engineering meetings and laying down a process for the ongoing builds, and the 1.0 release packages.
Martin, Mike, Todd and Daniel are busy working on a small surprise for MonoDevelop, that they are hoping to demostrate on the open house this Friday/Saturday.
Windows.Forms is alive again! Peter Bartok demostrated various applications working with the new Wine, and together with Jordi Mas, they are resolving the various rendering integration issues between Libgdiplus (cairo) and WineLib (Wine turned into a library).
I read with interest Edd's thoughts on XAML and a new UI for GNOME. I have been doing some small XAML tests recently, and it is a very easy markup to generate. As I mentioned before the issue with XAML is that it will be very attractive to developers to move from HTML to XAML, as it provides more control, more widgetry and is an extensible system.
The future of Linux on the desktop is in fact on the line: if enterprise developers and IT developers fall in love with Xaml for building their in-house applications it will marginalize again Linux on the desktop.
There are two views of how to solve this problem. The Nat Friedman view of building a matching system in the meantime: leveraging our existing technologies, or the Miggy-view, which is lets implement the Avalon/XAML API. I think we should pursue both paths.
Posted on 03 Mar 2004