Mono and Mainsoft have reached a milestone. Mainsoft has a VisualStudio.NET plugin that converts .NET assemblies into Java JAR files that can be executed on J2EE application servers such as Tomcat and WebSphere. Mainsoft has been donating code to Mono for a long time (most notably, code for the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace; see "Monkey Business" in DNDJ June 2004), and has been using Mono code in their product for just as long (note that most of Mono uses the MIT X11 license that allows Mono code to be used in commercial products, and that the Mono team is proud of the number of companies that make commercial use of Mono).

In the past, synchronizing the shared code was done using a painstaking manual process. Last October at the Mono Summit (see "Monkey Business" in DNDJ December 2004), Mainsoft and Mono agreed to work closer together in sharing code. The first step of this process was for Mono to switch from CVS to Subversion for version control, a task the Mono team completed late last year.

This process is now complete with Mono and Mainsoft working concurrently on the same code.

Version 1.1.5 Released
Mono version 1.1.5 is out, with almost 300 bug fixes since 1.1.4. Many of the fixes were in ADO.NET (the Oracle provider also gained connection pooling), and XML fixes from Mainsoft (see above). Support for npgsql (the data provider for the PostgreSQL database) continues to improve with stored procedures, as well as added support for record return type functions, Varchar, and updating output parameters when calling ExecuteReader().

MonoBasic, the Mono equivalent of VB.NET, still has a long way to go, but is being worked on heavily by Novell-sponsored programmers and others. Work has been done on functions such as MID, TO, IS, logical expressions such as ANDALSO, ORELSE, LIKE, and others. Implicit and explicit conversions are now complete. Some improvements have been made in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace.

SWF continues to receive a lot of attention; data binding is now being worked on, leaving the printing controls and the error and help providers as the only parts not complete or being worked on. Also, most issues with 64-bit processors have been fixed, so SWF now works on AMD64 (a few font issues still remain). Another 64-bit improvement is that X86-64 floating-point arithmetic now uses SSE2 instead of the old x87 stack instructions.

CAS (Code Access Security)
CAS allows the .NET runtime to examine the stack frame to determine what resources a program should be able to access. There are two parts to this: one is adding support to the runtime, and the other is adding permission attributes to the class libraries. Sebastien Pouliot has been working on the runtime part of CAS for the last few months, and has made a lot of progress. Much of the .NET 1.1 and some of the .NET 2.0 runtime CAS functions are now supported. The class library permission attributes are just getting started, and will be a long time in coming. More information on CAS can be found on the Microsoft Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/default.aspx?pull=/ library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/casbasics.asp.

The C# version 2.0 compiler edges closer to completion with the addition of Fixed Size Buffers and Nullable Types. Nullable types are normal types (such as ints) that allow null values to be processed. For instance, two ints a = 1 and b = null, can be multiplied together a*b; the result of this multiplication will be another null value. See more on Martin Baulig's blog at http://primates.ximian.com/~martin/blog/. This leaves the C# complier needing only namespace alias, external assembly alias, and friend assemblies to be fully C# 2.0 compliant.

Version 1.1.6 was released about a week after 1.1.5 to correct some install issues and other small bugs.

Odds and Ends
UNO (Universal Network Objects) is a software interface to Open Office, similar to COM for Microsoft Office. There are bindings for many languages, and now there is one for Mono. More details about UNO can be found at http://udk.openoffice.org/; information on the Mono version can be found at http://udk.openoffice.org/cli/cli-uno.html, and a screen shot on Mono can found at www.gnome.org/~martink/2005/mono-uno/ViewSample-on-Mono.png. In the middle of the screen shot is the spreadsheet being manipulated, on the right is a copy of the C# source code (in EMACS), and on the left is the console the program is running in.

Miguel had a great interview published by O'Reilly at www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2005/03/21/interviewmiguel.html.

Last month Monkey Business began its third year, this month I start my 50th year. Happy Birthday to me!