Team Mono met their goal of a first half 1.0 release. This happened just as we were going to press last month, but I was able to change the headline and first paragraph noting the release. This month, I will discuss it in detail, and finish with a look at some new directions for System.Windows. Forms (SWF).

Mono 1.0
Mono made its June 30 goal, so I was able to pack up a CD with the Mono 1.0 source, the install packages for the different OSs, documentation (such as release notes and how-tos), and a copy of Open Office for Windows and Linux. I then burned "Independence from Microsoft" Day CDs for the 4th of July party I mentioned back in the June issue. The next CDs I make will include MonoDevelop, SharpDevelop, and Eclipse.

This release supports 17 .NET namespaces, Java via IKVM, LDAP, GTK#, and more database-specific clients than the two (MS SQL and Oracle) that Microsoft supports. Most of these functions run under Mono on seven different CPUs, and under six different OSs. Compile under Visual Studio on Windows and run on S390 under Mono. Compile under Mono on the Mac and run on Windows using the Microsoft .NET runtime. Of course, you can run all of these using Mono on Windows without Microsoft .NET if you want.

Did I mention tools? Included in the release are an assembler, disassembler, debugger, utilities for Web service setup, the ASP.NET Web server (XSP), and mod_mono for using Mono's ASP.NET services on Apache. Of course, Mono ASP.NET modules run on SQL Server as if they were built with Visual Studio.

Missing
There are, of course, some limitations. Java compatibility is limited to features supported by the GNU Classpath libraries, which are an open source implementation of the Java classes. It supports versions 1.0 - 1.4, and much of it is complete. Its weaknesses are similar to the ones Mono has: GUI, component interop, and security. Mono is weak in System.Windows.Forms; Classpath has no AWT, and Swing is halfway done (see http://gadek.debian.net/SableVM-Swing-new/ for screenshots). Mono has little COM interop; CORBA is almost non-existent in Classpath. These things are just hard to do in a cross-platform manner. Otherwise, Classpath looks close to complete (see www.gnu.org/software/classpath/classpath.html under Classpath::Status links to view the status for each version of Java).

The Mono assembler is missing a few key features, and the disassembler is both incomplete and likely to be replaced.

There is no support for COM, RuntimeInteropServices are missing a dozen classes, System.Windows.Forms is missing in action, and the VB compiler is at a very early state. System.Drawing is good enough to be officially supported, but still has many unfinished details, such as different line and brush style attributes, and format conversions.

Security has a lot of different facets and touches everything from assembly signing to certificates, Code Access Security (CAS), and encryption. Mono fully supports many of these features, but quite a few of them still need work, and some still need a lot of work.

Some classes, such as the DB2 and Oracle connection classes, rely on commercial libraries from those companies, and will not work on computers that do not already have those installed.

A group of students called NSIP (Novell Student Internship Program) has posted a list of Mono related tasks students and others can work on. The list is at mono-list/2004-July/022118.html.

SWF
The big missing piece is SWF. In version 1.0, SWF is so broken that a font issue prevents loading even a blank form. In retrospect, we should have rolled SWF back to a point where it had some functionality. The good news is that SWF is one of the top priorities for version 1.2, and Novell has programmers working on it full time. Right now, the infrastructure is being rewritten again. This time, System.Drawing will replace Wine. This is similar to the way in which Portable.NET is implementing SWF, except that Mono is using Cairo as the base for System.Drawing, and Portable.NET is utilizing X11.

Work Continues
We started freezing the Mono code about two months before the release of 1.0 by adding limits on what kind of changes could be checked in. So, as soon as version control was reopened, work continued on WSE2 and XML2 and a flood of optimizations were checked in. Mainsoft, continuing their support for Mono, have taken on the task of improving performance and scability in the Mono ASP.NET and ADO.NET libraries. Also, two Mono members have taken on the tasks of keeping Mono current on FreeBSD and S390.