Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: January 24, 2003

  • Hello Mono!

    I grabbed the mono-0.19 rpms and installed mono on one of my Linux dev boxes this afternoon.  I’m at work, but that’s not going to stop me (thanks SSH!).  I snagged a hello world sample and fired mono up:

    [user@box mono]$ mcs HelloMono.cs
    Compilation succeeded
    [user@box mono]$ mono HelloMono.exe
    Hello Mono

    It works.

    Ingo might be interested in the remoting aspects of Mono.  Currently, the oversimplified not really practical basic remoting is supported.  I recall Miguel saying that a SOAP serializer is either done or mostly done (maybe only in CVS) and that someone has just finished binary serialization for remoting.

    I’m not a remoting guy, so I might have screwed all that up.  Perhaps it’s time to break out the copy of Thinking in C# that I ordered and downloaded.

    Update: For extra cool points, I snagged the source code for Thinking in C#, and took a stroll to chapter 3:

    [user@box 03]$ mono HelloDate.exe
    Hello, it's:
    01/24/2003 17:50:16

    Pretty cool, though I am running into a brick wall with things like System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol which hasn’t been implemented yet.

  • LinuxWorld In Words – Mono Notes

    I stuck around LinuxWorld until Miguel de Icaza issued his State of the Mono Address.  I’ve been following the Mono project for some time via the website, but this was much better.

    C# is done, VB is 70% done, and JavaScript is 50% done.  This is good.  Miguel demonstrated an almost unmodified version of iBuySpy that was only really slow because it was connecting to an MSSQL server in Spain over 802.11b.

    In theory, you could write an ASP.NET web application today and deploy it on a Linux server using Mono.  You can reuse the docs that are available for C# and .NET (from Microsoft), and you can also reuse the docs and resources available from MS and third parties.

    Miguel stressed that we should reuse the Microsoft booth (next to the Mono booth) to learn about all of the cool ASP stuff that you can do.

    The Mono team is also working on a new version fo their JIT compiler which will speed up apps significantly.  He also demoed a sweet debugger written in GTK# (GTK bindings for C#) and a digital camera organization app that he wrote for himself (not for you).  It was running slow over a wireless connection, so he brought out the laptop to reassure us that the app was fast and non-blocking.

    It is obvious that WinForms is one of the least mature parts of Mono.  More people are interested in using Mono for hosting ASP apps, so that stuff is getting done quicker.  He stressed several times that if we wrote some regression tests, patched some code, did some documentation, that Mono would be complete in a matter of weeks.

    There is database support for pretty much every popular database that runs under Linux.  You can take an exe produced from Visual Studio or the mono compiler and run it using mono.

    Overall I was impressed by the state of Mono and the demos.  It’s awsome to be able to take a Microsoft demo app out of the box and run it using Mono.  There were only a few configuration changes that had to be made to take case specific files into consideration.  Other than that, it just worked: mono server.exe 8080.

  • LinuxWorld in Pictures

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Entrance to the Javits Center

    LinuxWorld 2003
    People lining up for ‘IBM Customer Day’

    LinuxWorld 2003
    The IBM Booth

    LinuxWorld 2003
    The AMD Booth

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Helix Presentation

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Intel’s PCXPO booth was cooler

    LinuxWorld 2003
    JXTA Presentation at the Sun booth

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Presentations at the Red Hat booth were well attended

    LinuxWorld 2003
    The Sun and IBM booths were really close together

    LinuxWorld 2003
    The dot-org section is where all the hackers were

    LinuxWorld 2003
    This is pyDDR. It is not running on a PS2

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Ximian’s jungle motif

    LinuxWorld 2003
    ‘Cluster’ was the buzzword of the day

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Best In Show

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Miguel de Icaza showing off his app in Mono

    LinuxWorld 2003
    Miguel swore that the program was running slowly because of the wireless connection

    LinuxWorld 2003
    He ran it on localhost, it’s fast!

    LinuxWorld 2003
    It was really cold

  • Dive Into Premium

    Mark Pilgrim is introducing Dive Into Premium, with access to premium Dive Into content.  It is subscription-based, and IMHO is very reasonable for what it will be offering.  YMMV.

    Wow, it’s not even April yet.

  • Skimming the News

    I’ve stumbled upon many things that need to be explored in depth, but for the time being, here are a few quick links that I thought were interesting:

    • [H]ard|OCP: “The mini digital media boards known as the VIA EPIA M-Series Mini-ITX mainboards get certification from Microsoft for their CE embedded OS. Kinda cool, you know…a tiny OS for a tiny PC.”
    • BBC: “Looking to the future, Mr Iwata said Nintendo was planning to launch a next-generation console in 2005 or 2006.”
    • Roblimo had fun hanging out at the dot-org section of Linux World.  That corner was less PR BS and more work/play than the rest of the show.  More on that later.
    • Wired News: “NEW YORK — Penguin jokes are proliferating in even greater numbers than usual at LinuxWorld 2003.”
    • Greg released a new version of NewsGator.

  • Gentile++

    Congrats to Sam and Sue.

  • Blosxom 1.0 and pyRuby?

    Here’s two birds with one stone.  So if you show up at PyCon, Sam, will you still be wearing your Perl shirt?

    Rael Dornfest: I’m thrilled to announce the 1.0 release of my Blosxom weblog app…. With the choice of dynamic or static rendering, Blosxom is at the point I’d hoped it’d be when it went 1.0.

    Now I have my first dillema. I want to do static rendering for scalability, but in accordance with the teachings of REST, I also want my URI to identify resources that can serve both GETs and POSTs.

    Meanwhile, the temptation to ditch Perl for Python is growing…

  • Back

    I’m back from Linux World.  I’m trying to simultaneously catch up on my RSS feeds, organize my notes and thoughts, and get some pictures organized.