Gonzalo yesterday pointed me to a feature in the HTTP client stack for .NET that I did not know about.

If you want the server to gzip the response before sending it to you, set the AutomaticDecompression flag in your HttpWebRequest:

	var request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create (uri);
	request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip;
	

This will set the Accept-Encoding HTTP header to gzip when you make your connection and automatically decompress this for you when you get the response stream.

Update: on the comments there is a suggestion that Deflate is another option you can use, and you can combine both GZip + Deflate on the flags above.

Update2: Dennis Dietric emailed me to point out an important bit: if the server side does not support GZip or Deflate content, you will could get a 406 return code, so when dealing with third party web sites you need to be prepared to fall back and retry your request without compression in place. The relevant sections of rfc 2616 are 10.4.7, 14.1 and 14.3.

Over the past couple of years Microsoft has been open sourcing some key .NET libraries under the MS-PL or Apache 2 license.

We are tremendously grateful to Microsoft for making these components open source. This has allowed us to distribute this in the past, and we are going to be bundling a lot more of it with Mono 2.8:

In Mono 2.8, the following assemblies and code come from Microsoft:

• Managed Extensibility Framework, a framework to create extensible applications (blogged about their open sourcing).
• The Dynamic Language Runtime is the engine that powers IronPython and IronRuby, but also third party efforts like IronJS and RemObject's Javascript compiler. This lives largely in the System.Core assembly in .NET 4. Some of the code is also used in Mono's version of System.Numerics.
• OData's .NET client (System.Data.Services.Client), I blogged about this here.
• ASP.NET MVC both MVC1 and MVC2.
• Microsoft's AJAX library for use with ASP.NET WebForms.
• Silverlight's Controls, these are used by Moonlight.

With Mono 2.8 we are going to default to the .NET 4.0 profile. So from the list above MEF, the DLR, OData and MVC2 become first class citizens in Mono-land, no longer third-party packages that you needed to install.

Update: as of July 17th 2010, the DLR, IronPython and IronRuby changed their licenses from MS-PL to Apache2.

I am very excited to see the first MonoTouch book published.

You could not ask for a better team of authors to explain the MonoTouch and the iPhone platform. Chris, Craig, Martin, Rory, and Wally.

This book was a team effort by various active members of the MonoTouch community. They nurtured the community from the start by exploring MonoTouch, by reporting bugs and missing functionality in MonoTouch and by guiding .NET developers through the new world of building iPhone applications.

Congratulations on the book release guys!

You can find them here:

• Chris Hardy twitter, blog
• Craig Dunn twitter, blog
• Martin Bowling twitter, blog
• Rory Blyth (twitter, blog
• Wallace McClure twitter, blog

Jonathan Pobst has released a new version of his paint program, Pinta, a lightweight app that runs on Linux, OSX and Windows and is built entirely using Gtk#.

In this version, Jonathan added the MonoDevelop docking library to allow users to reorder the editing tools to match their workflow:

There are ready-to-run packages available for Windows, OSX, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.

(See below for Updates).

TweetStation is my first native iPhone app (as opposed to my award-winning HTML5-app iCoaster). More screenshots can be seen here

Just like Rails, TweetStation is an opinionated Tweeting client, it contains my personal blend of features that I enjoy from other twitter clients, but also tries to do something about changing the world.

TweetStation has been designed to elevate the level of discourse on Twitter.

At a conceptual level, this is achieved by applying the cardinal rule of not taking anything too seriously, specially any interactions you might have online.

At a practical level this is achieved with two features. The first feature plays back chicken noises whenever you request more Tweets (this is bound to the Tweetie-like "Pull to Refresh" feature). These chicken noises have been engineered to remind you that no matter how important an argument appears to be in Twitter, you should not take it too seriously.

Additionally, the chicken-noise-on-refresh serves as a cue to other people talking to you that you rather see what @jacksonh, or @Mickey__Rourke have to say than hear them parrot back the physics of clouds wikipedia page that they just read twenty minutes ago.

When you compose a message with TweetStation music starts playing back in the background. This music was specially selected to elicit in you the desire to write a witty and clever response as opposed to the usual "well, fuck you too" response seen too often on social media sites. The result will be the kind of tweet that your local newspaper would publish in the front page, or in their "Social Media Expert" column.

But there is an elephant in the room, and I want to speak directly about it. Many Twitteristas are concerned about the Tweetpocalypse and Twitter's transition to use some bizarro world non-feature called OAuth.

Tweetstation is feature packed and does not suffer from either problem. You can trust that Tweetstation was developed using the best engineering techniques available today, and that you will never be the victim of the Tweetpocalypse and be left incommunicado due to some silly programming mistake. Not in this 32-bit century, not in the next, and not under my watch. If my years of experience taught me one thing is and one thing only, it is when to use a 32-bit integer data type and when to use a 64-bit one. Do not fear dear user, I also master many other data types, but I digress.

But you might be wondering, why another Twitter client, and why now? As a twitterista you know that there is a special bond, an intimate bond if you will, between the twitterista and his twitter client. This bond can exist as long as both the twitterista and the twitter client grow hand in hand, if they co-develop. And I found myself at odds with the design decisions and paths that other twitter clients were taking. In a metaphorical way, I felt uncomfortable, like a Woody Allen character under pressure. But a character that lacked Woody Allen's command of the language.

And this is how TweetStation was born, it was a labor of love, but mostly of social awkwardness when my friends mocked my Twitter client for lacking a chicken noise, or when they suggested things at dinner like "would it not be cool if...". I decided to change all that, and make sure that other twitteristas in the future did not feel the social scorn that I had gone through, and this is why TweetStation's source code is on github.

Getting TweetStation

You can get TweetStation from iTunes.

Activating the Chicken Noises

By default, the chicken noises are off. To turn on this features, go to "Settings" and in the "Poultry" section set "Chicken Noises" to the "ON" position.

TrollStation Pro vs TweetStation

Since this is going to become a FAQ, I wanted to address this here.

I have two sets of keys that I got from Twitter to access the service using OAuth. One set of keys is the regular set of keys that anyone can get, and I attached the name "TrollStation Pro" to that one. This set of keys is what I placed on the public code on GitHub, so anyone can try and anyone can use. I reserve the right to change that name on a day-by-day basis depending on what I consider to be funny that particular day.

The second set of keys are labeled as "TweetStation" and that one is used for the actual application on the AppStore. These keys are special because Twitter was kind enough to give me access to their service using "xAuth" which improves the login experience (no web browser is involved).

Retina Display

TweetStation was submitted to Apple before I could get my hands on an iPhone4, so it is missing the high-resolution artwork. I just submitted a build that contains high-resolution icons for the iPhone4.

Updates

Login bug: There is a login bug if your password contains any special characters. I have submitted a bug fix to Apple (including the Retina display update). For now you can work around this issue by changing your password to use letters and numbers.

This year I will be skipping the Guadec conference. Like Ted Gould we are expecting our first baby this year around the same time that Guadec will take place.

The good news is that next year any of you attending my talk at Guadec 2011 will get to enjoy a presentation packed with baby pictures.

I wish a happy Guadec to all the Gnomers attending!

Apple and its AppStore did for software programmers what Google's AdWord did for bloggers and writers: it provided a mechanism for people to make money while doing what they love.

The AppStore takes a big weight from the shoulders of software developers by taking care of the distribution and billing system.

If I was in charge of the Windows 8 future (or MacOS for that matter), I would try to reproduce that formula on my mainstream operating system. And it seems from the leaked presentations that this is where Microsoft's head is.

The leaked mockups for the AppStore are creative, but the entire slide deck misses the fundamental point that people are scared of installing software on Windows.

Everyone is scared of installing applications on Windows either because they break the system or because you might be accidentally installing malware. In either case, the end result is countless wasted hours backing data up, reinstalling the operating sytem and all the applications.

An AppStore wont fix this.

For a Windows appstore to work, they need to guarantee that installing software wont ever break the system.

They need to produce an appliance that allows users to install and remove software in seconds, and yet, guarantee that installing and removing apps will never break the system. This is not a problem that can be solved by hiring an army of curators and people that just sit all day rejecting apps.

To solve the problem, Microsoft needs to both alter their kernel to ensure the safety of the host OS and come up with a new way of distributing applications. They need:

• A sandboxed execution system.
• Self contained applications, fully embedded in a single directory that require no installation.
• A set of supported APIs that will run in the Sandbox execution system.
• A public contract for extension points.

The Sandboxed Execution System: would prevent applications from touching the registry, installing any drivers, any hooks, any visualizers or any other deep integration features that applications typically use to integrate with the OS.

The sandboxed execution system would prevent applications from looking at the file system, except for locations that have been predetermined for sharing.

The kernel would have to enforce what files they get access to, what devices and what components they get access to. And should be set to a bare minimum.

Self Contained Applications would be required to install software from the network, or from their appstore. These applications would get absolutely no rights to modify anything outside their directory. Any extension points that they could register with the system ("open with") would have to be registered with the public extension point contract.

Public Contract for Extension Points Any extension points like "open with", or handlers for mime-types would be self contained in a manifest in the application directory.

Instead of having every app poking at the system registry and dumping their junk everywhere, applications would list all of their requirements from the operating system on the manifest and the OS would rebuild its internal data from all of the application manifests available from a user.

Limited APIs: File access APIs, display access APIs would have to be altered to give applications limited access to the host operating system, and to give them as little access to anything that most applications do not need.

The above obviously does not apply to frameworks like the .NET framework, Java or Adobe's AIR. But beyond frameworks, there are very few cases where an application really should have legitimate access to all of the features in the OS. Video games certainly do not need it, and even applications like Visual Studio would not need it.

Chris Toshok has just announced our 7th preview of Moonlight 3.0. You can get it from our preview site.

What is new in this release:

• Roughly API complete to SL4.0 beta. Next preview will be API compatible with SL 4.0 RTW.
• Video capture support, but support for pixel formats is sparse. right now the supported formats are YUYV and YV12/YUV420 (planar).
• SSE2 fast paths for gradient fills in the embedded pixman/cairo, this improves performance significantly as some people seem to have discovered the use of gradients.
• Fixes for chrome support and to our curl bridge.
• Several html bridge fixes.
• element to element binding.
• Client HTTP stack
• cascading (BasedOn) styles are now supported
• new right-click dialog so we can (finally!) managed isostore usage.

Today Infragistics announced that their NetAdvantage for ASP.NET will support Mono out of the box.

We loved working with Infragistics on this project, and I am very proud of the work that the Mono team did to get these fabulous controls working with Mono.

You can read more about Infragistics and Mono on Infragistics site where you can also try out some of their sample applications running on Linux with Mono.

From the press release:

"In recent years, our customers have indicated that their organizations are moving to mixed IT environments and require UI tools that enable them to deploy applications in either Windows or open source environments," said Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics. "With Mono compatibility in our ASP.NET toolkit, we enable developers who have a need for open source development to create UIs that are the basis for Killer Applications and deliver the best user experiences possible."

Infragistics ASP.NET toolset excels in top performance, flexibility and usability and enables developers to build rich Web applications for line of business. By providing full compatibility with the Mono runtime, Infragistics extends this functionality to the Mono community.

Coinciding with today's NetAdvantage for .NET 2010 Volume 2 availability, Infragistics highlights the ASP.NET toolkit's Mono compatibility through Sample Showcase hosted on a live Linux Server running Mono: http://mono.infragistics.com/

For us this is a very important milestone as developers building .NET applications need to complement the core framework with packaged components like the ones that Infragistics provides.

It also shows the maturity of the project, as commercial ISVs start supporting more Mono on Linux.

We have finally released MonoDevelop 2.4. You can read a high-level description of the changes or see screenshots with the details. I would go for the screenshots myself.

We made packages for OpenSUSE, SLES, Windows and MacOS X. For other Linux distributions, you should consult with your favorite package provider or you can build it yourself from sources.

Congratulations to the team. They not only improved the UI and the editing experience, but they support Gtk#, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, MonoMac and MonoTouch deployments from the same IDE. We have also added support for WCF references and T4 macro processing.

Next Steps for MonoDevelop

For the next release we have a couple of big goals in mind for MonoDevelop:

• Git support, using GitSharp.
• Mono on Android support (debugging, templates, deployment).
• Templates and support for MVC2.

Support for Foo is missing

As you can see from our list of MonoDevelop Tasks there are plenty of tasks that currently have nobody assigned to. This includes even popular features like F#, IronPython, IronRuby or PHP support.

We have limited resources and a huge wish-list. If you want to help us take on any of those tasks, please join us on IRC at irc.gnome.org on channel #monodevelop, or join our mailing lists.