Fun Mono Updates

Jackson has a couple of blog entries where he discusses how to use memcached for doing output caching of ASP.NET pages. Memcached was created to improve the performance of LiveJournal:

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

His memcached module is described here and an explanation on why and how to add caching to your ASP.NET controls is here.

What is interesting about Jackson's approach is that it hooks up to ASP.NET's caching system and allows caching to be parameterized based on some values (for example, your login name would update only the login-bound information, but information that does not depend on this would be rendered from the cache).

Hopefully Jackson's work will become a standard part of Mono installations in the future.

Windows.Forms 2.0 Updates

Jonathan Pobst has posted some screenshots showing the progress from Mono 1.2.3 released a few weeks ago and the current SVN for some of the 2.0 Strip controls:

click for full image.

The Winforms team has been using our Paint.NET 2.72 port as a test case, see Jonathan Pobst's blog for more screenshots.

Jackson is also running a screenshot contest for Mono's Windows.Forms.

Jeff's new MonoDevelop Indent Code

Jeff Stedfast recently joined the Mono team, his first contribution was the implementation of a smart indenter for MonoDevelop's C# mode.

We basically wanted something that indented as well as Emacs would indent C# code. See his blog entry for details, the code is now checked into SVN in the module "monodevelop".

ASP.NET 2.0 support improving

Marek got a few new features implemented for ASP.NET: Themes are now working, and MojoPortal 2.0 works with Mono now:

Marek also reduced the space that we consume for ASP.NET setups. Instead of creating a new temporary directory every time, we now create predictable directory names based on the assembly name.

We have run into a number of small problems with our TDS provider when porting applications that use MS-SQL stored procedures. Luckily Andreia Gaita has a patch that should be going into SVN in the next couple of days that resolves that.