Mono version 1.2.4 has just been released. Typically source code for a release is branched off for final clean up and bug fixing, with the release coming a few days to a week later; for this version, there were almost 25 days between branch and release. This may have been due in part to distractions such as the 24 new Google Summer of Code (SOC) programmers and the new Silverlight beta, but mostly I think it was because the team sees this release as more than just a point release, so they spent extra time testing it to make sure it was good. Another factor is the size of this release. As I mentioned last month, it contains over 20 megabytes of diff files, and the release notes point that out with the help of Moma, it also contains over 1,000 newly implemented APIs (680 new APIs, 290 not implemented, and 43 TODOs done).

Shortly after version 1.2.4 was branched off, the Moma tool was used to compare 1.2.4 to the Microsoft implementation, and the results were 18,425 missing APIs, 3,714 not implemented exceptions, and 3,691 TODOs. After review, it turns out that about 8,000 of the missing APIs were internal APIs used in the implementation of .NET and not meant to be used at the application level. Also, some were Windows-specific APIs that Mono won't be implementing. The same analysis would also decrease the number that throw not-implemented exceptions and that have TODOs, but I don't have those numbers. That sounds like a lot, but considering how complete Mono is, what it really shows is how huge .NET is. If you look at the Mono status page, you can see that most namespaces are 98% done. Many of the missing functions are from System.Windows.Forms 2.0 and other 2.0 classes; others are Windows-specific (COM interop, which is being minimally implemented). Moma reports are allowing the Mono team to concentrate on the most-used functionality first, and as I have pointed out before, running the Mono utility on .NET programs is one of the best and easiest ways to help the project.

Because of the long delay between when 1.2.4 was branched and frozen and the time it was released, there have been a lot of changes made to the main Mono branch, so I expect those will be packaged into a 1.2.4.1 version in short order. I also expect the next few months will also see some big improvements in the Mono packages (Mono, MonoDevelop, etc.). In addition to the 24 students Google is paying to work on Mono over the summer (it is my understanding that in the past two years, Mono has had one of the best records of successful SOC project completions, having SOC projects integrated into the main project with continued maintenance, and continued involvement of the students after the end of the summer [but note that even with Mono, at the end of the summer, most students go back to school and get too busy to continue contributing]), Novell has gone on a bit of a hiring spree and hired several programmers for the Mono project, including long-time Mono contributor JB Evain (author of the Cecil reflection tool used in several Mono projects) and Mike Krueger, creator of SharpDevelop (long-time readers will know what I think about Mike, SharpDevelop, and the book (Dissecting a C# Application: Inside C#, get a free pdf versions from www.apress.com/free/content/Dissecting_A_CSharp_Application.pdf) he co-authored!), and a QA person.

One of this year's SOC coders, Scott Peterson, is working on the Banshee Media Player, but has gotten off to an early start by working on variable type inference, anonymous types, implicitly typed arrays, object initialization, and collection initialization for C# 3.0. You can read one of his short blogs on the subject at http://themonkeysgrinder.blogspot.com/2007/05/3rd-is-one-with-treasure-chest.html (note that these will appear in 1.2.5). C# 3.0 improvements included in this release are extension methods, anonymous methods, and lambda expressions.

ASP.NET 2.0 is complete except for Web parts, but it still received a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and tools. One of the tools is installvst, which installs VisualStudio source packages, aka starter kits that allow you to install the starter kits from http://asp.net under Mono.

System.Windows.Form continues to improve and add support for 2.0 controls. 1.2.4 has over 150 bug fixes, performance enhancements, plus more work on ToolStrip, shortcut keys, layouts, balloon tips, and hundreds of new 2.0 methods in various controls. System.Drawing has been updated to use Cairo 1.4.2 (Cairo is the low-level library Mono bases its System.Drawing on), and many printing issues have been corrected. New corrections to VBNC (VB New Compiler, the new Mono implementation of VB) allow it to be used with ASP.NET, and it now supports the My namespace.

System.Linq and System.Linq.Expressions from .NET 3.0 have been updated. SQLite has new bindings, more socket 2.0 methods have been implemented, and COM support now includes COM callable Wrappers.