mono/NEWS

Hello everyone!

      We are releasing a new version of Mono, Mono 0.22. A new release
is made today because of the few recent bug-fixes that were committed
to CVS.

     Source code and binaries for this release can be found on the
     web page,

	   http://www.go-mono.com/download.html

     The URLs for the sources are:

     * MCS package (the Class Libraries, C# and VB.NET compiler
       and other assorted tools written in Managed code):

	    http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.22.tar.gz

     * Mono package (the Runtime engine and JIT compiler):

	    http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.22.tar.gz

     RPM packages for this release can be downloaded from the web-page
as well as from the 'Mono' channel on Red Carpet. Debian packages will
appear on the download page later, as well as an installer for our
Windows users.

     Since last Thursday, 320 commits have been made to our CVS
repository. These following hackers contributed to Mono since version
0.21:

     Aleksey Demakov, Alexandre Pigolkine, Atsushi Enomoto, Elan
     Feingeld, Dick Porter, Dietmar Maurer, Duncan Mak, Gonzalo
     Paniagua, Ian MacLean, Jackson Harper, Jean-Marc Andre, Jerome
     Laban, Lluis Sanchez, Martin Baulig, Miguel de Icaza, Nick
     Drochak, Paolo Molaro, Pedro Martinez, Per Ameng, Peter Williams,
     Rafael Teixeira, Reggie Burnett, Sebastien Pouliot, Tim Coleman
     and Zoltan Varga.

Highlights:

    * The "MemoryStream" bug.
       This bug affected a lot of classes, and made them crashy,
       database code, XML parsing and a few others were
       crashing. Thanks to Gonzalo for fixing this bug.
	
    * System.Data:
	More bug fixes from Aleksey and Tim.

    * Reflection:
        Zoltan continues to provide fixes to our Reflection.Emit code
        to host IKVM. 
    
    * Remoting:
	Lluis added support for activation using activation
	attributes.
	 
    * PEToolkit:
	Jackson imported the PEAPI package from the Queensland
	University of Technology in Australia. This will replace the
	existing Mono.PEToolkit for our ILasm back-end.

    * Windows Forms:
	More fixes from Reggie and Alexandre.
	
    * System.Web.Mail:
	Per has been working on this namespace. He announces recently
	that all major parts of System.Web.Mail has now been implemented.

    * System.Web.Mobile:
        Gaurav continues to make progress here.

    * Misc:

        Ian MacLean contributed a /compile flag to monoresgen and
        assorted bug-fixes and improvements from the rest of the team.


    My name is Duncan Mak, and I just made my first Mono release.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone!

    The Mono Team introduces the best Mono release so far we have
done.  Thanks to everyone who contributed fixes, code, ideas, and bug
reports.  

    Mono 0.20 has been released, it is available at the usual location:

	http://www.go-mono.com/download.html

    This is a truly heroic release of Mono.  Major architectural
chunks that were missing, or were miss-implemented have been fixed in
this release, and we are very proud of it.  Please see the list of
features, because there is no short way of introducing just how good
this release is.  A big thanks goes to Piers for setting up a
Tinderbox that monitors problems with the Mono CVS repository.

    We released packages for SuSE 8.0, Mandrake 8.2, and various
Red Hat releases.  It is also available from Red Carpet on the Mono
channel.

   Source code for Mono, MCS, the Mono Debugger, XSP is available as
well from that web page.  The sources are:

     MCS package (Class Libraries, C# and VB.NET compiler and managed tools):

	http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.20.tar.gz

     Mono package (Runtime engine, JIT compiler):

	http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.20.tar.gz

     XSP package (XSP test web server for ASP.NET webforms):

	http://www.go-mono.com/archive/xsp-0.3.tar.gz

    This release is brought to you by: Alvaro del Castillo, Alan Tam,
Alp Toker, Alejandro Sánchez, Alexandre Pigolkin, Atsushi Enomoto,
Brian Ritchie, Christopher Bockner, Daniel Lopez, Daniel Morgan,
Dennis Hayes, Dick Porter, Dietmar Maurer, Duncan Mak, Gaurav Vaish,
Gonzalo Paniagua, Jackson Harper, Jaime Anguiano, Jeff Stedfast,
Johannes Roith, John Sohn, Jonathan Pryor, "Lee Mallabone, "Lluis
Sanchez, "Marco Ridoni, Mark Crichton, Martin Baulig, Martin Willemoes
Hansen, Miguel de Icaza, Mike Kestner, Nick Drochak, Paolo Molaro,
Patrik Torstensson, Pedro Martinez, Per Arneng, Peter Williams, Petr
Danecek, Piers Haken, Radek Doulik, Rafael Teixeira, Rodrigo Moya,
Sebastien Pouliot, Tim Coleman, Ville Palo, and Zoltan Varga.

   They commited 1810 changes to CVS patches in the past 33 days.

* New in this release

      * Zoltan and IKVM

	Zoltan's patches to run Jeroen's IKVM (the Java VM that
	translates JVM bytecodes into .NET bytecodes) are in.  

      * Remoting.

	The remoting team's patches that were held off on the previous
	release are here.  Lluis and Patrik have done a fantastic job
	in getting remoting to work.  Many low-level runtime engine
	changes, and plenty of work on the class-library stuff.
	
	Lluis has posted a couple of sample applications to the
	mailing list, you can try those out.

	The new release includes a working BinaryFormatter and
	BinaryFormatterSink.  It means that together with TcpChannel
	it is possible to make remote calls with any type of
	parameters and return values, including value types,
	MarshalByRefObject types (that are properly
	marshalled/unmarshalled), delegates, enums, etc.

	RemotingConfiguration is partially implemented. It cannot read
	from config files, but manual configuration using the api is
	fully working.

	Implemented full support for client activated types and for
	well known objects (both singleton and single call).

	Lease manager fully working (it manages the lifetime of server
	objects).

	Implemented interception of the new operator, so it is
	possible to create a remote object using "new", if the type is
	properly registered in RemotingConfiguration.

	In Lluis' words: `Basically, 0.20 will have almost all needed
	for a distributed application with Remoting'

      * New threading semantics, IO-layer

	Dick Porter in a couple of weeks has heroically redone much of
	the threading support to match the .NET behavior (details are
	on the .NET threading book as posted on the Mono site).

	He also did a lot of bug fixes in the IO/threading space.  The
	threading implementation now contains a new and faster Monitor
	implementation, as well as a correct Pulse()/Wait()
	implementation. 

	GC thread finalization has been re-enabled.  This means that
	finalizers will be ran on a separate thread, as done in the
	Microsoft.NET Framework.  This might expose some bugs on
	existing finalizer code.

      * Moved to NUnit2

	Nick and Gonzalo helped us move to the new NUnit2 platform for 
	all of our tests.   A big applause goes to them.

     * Cross Appdomain invocations work now.

        ASP.NET and NUnit2 both used cross appdomain invocations, we
        have fixed a number of problems, and they are now functional.

	The AppDomain fixes and the Remoting fixes have allowed us to
	remove a number of hacks in the ASP.NET implementation that
        were previously there.

	Implemented CrossAppDomainChannel, for calls between domains.

     * C# Compiler and Debugging.

	When generating debugging information in the compiler (with
        -debug, -g or -debug+) the compiler will embed the debugging
        information into the resulting executable instead of
        generating a separate file.  Very nice.

	Generating debugging information has also improved vastly
        performance-wise, and now it is possible to always use
        debugging builds for software development.

	A number of bugs were fixed on the compiler as well and
	by using the Mono profiler we have reduced the memory
	consumption and accelerated the compiler.

	Thanks to Jackson, Martin, Paolo and for helping here.

      * VB.NET Compiler.

	Plenty of new features are included in the compiler in our
        path to conformance.  See <FIXME:get-url-for-posting> for
        details on the status of the compiler, and the pieces missing.

      * ILasm and Mono.PEToolkit.

	Work on the IL assembler has resumed, but it is not yet ready
        for production use.  The Mono IL Assembler uses the
        Mono.PEToolkit library done by Sergey and Jackson to
        manipulate CIL image files.

      * Cryptographic work.

	Sebastien has provided a cert2spc and secutil tools for
	certificate management.  This is the first release that ships
	an assembly for System.Security

	Also a new internal assembly used only on Windows allows Mono
	users to use the unmanaged crypto providers.

      * System.XML

	Atsushi has continued to improve the work on our XML
        implementation: fixing bugs and more closely matching the
        Microsoft implementation.

      * More PowerPC/Alpha support.

	Taylor Christopher has contributed more code generation macros
	for PPC and Laramie Leavitt for Alpha.

      * System.XML.Xsl

	Gonzalo continued the implementation of our XSLT transformation
        API (custom .NET functions are still missing though).  It no
        longer uses temporary files to apply transformations.  Thanks
        to an idea from Zdravko Tashev.  Xslt Web controls work as
        part of this fix.

      * ASP.NET

	Gonzalo has cleaned up a lot the code base, and now our test
	server supports a --root and --virtual command line options
	for better control. 

	Also, now we generate a much nicer error page on errors.  We
	are looking for volunteers to improve the default look of this
	page.

	Authentication is now supported

      * Mobile Controls.

	Gaurav Vaish continues on his quest to complete the
	implementation of the Mobile controls.  These controls are
	required to run a stock IBuySpy application.

      * Class Libraries:

	New Mono.Posix class library that contains classes for working
	on a Posix systems.  Things like Unix domain sockets are here.

      * System.Windows.Forms

	Alexandre Pigolkine continues to contribute more code to our
	Windows.Forms implementation.  Currently it only runs on
	Windows (or in Linux without GC enabled, due to the
	pthread/Wine threading library mismatch.  This is being
	actively addressed as part of the Wine work due to the
	movement to the new thread implementation available in RH 8.1).

      * Database providers

	Christopher Bockner has updated his DB2 database provider (now
	with prepared statement functionality) and Tim Coleman has
	continued work on the Oracle database provider (welcome back
	Tim!)

      * Database code.

	Dan Morgan continues to develop core components in System.Data
	(and now we welcome Alan Tam to the System.Data core hackers)

	The SQL# tool now supports MySQLNet, Npgsql, DB2Client, and
	Oracle clients.

      * Runtime

	mono --profile now performs memory allocation profiling too.

      * Runtime fixes.

	We now support multi-module with external file reference
	assemblies.  

	The above in English means that we can now run Eiffel.NET code
	in Mono.

      * Monograph:

	More statistics supported now.

      * System.Web.Mail

	Per has contributed the code for this namespace.

* Bugs 

	Plenty of bugs were closed.  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone!

   We have made a new release of Mono available.  Despite the fact
that we just did Mono 0.18, this release is packed with new features.

* Availability.

   Mono 0.19 is available in package format from:

	http://www.go-mono.com/download.html

   We released packages for SuSE 8.0, Mandrake 8.2, Debian and various
Red Hat releases.  It is also available from Red Carpet on the Mono
channel.

   Source code for Mono, MCS, the Mono Debugger, XSP is available as
well from that web page. 

* New in this release

	* Remoting news:

		Lluis has implemented and documented the Binary formatter
		Woohoo!  He has done a lot of work as well to support
		remoting.

		Patrik has also been working heavily on fixing a
		number of remoting related bugs and missing features.

		Ajay also implemented 1-d array serialization in System.Xml

	* New database provider: IBM DB2

		Christopher Bockner has contributed a DB2 data
		provider for System.Data.  We have a very complete
		range of data providers.
		
	* System.Web.Mobile

		Gaurav has started work on this assembly, this will
		allow us to run the unmodified reference ASP.NET
		applications that were designed to support Mobile
		browsing.

	* System.Data and System.XML:

		More implementation work on XmlDataDocument from Ville
		and plenty of fixes from Atsushi.

	* MacOS patches:

		Paolo integrated John Duncan's and Benjamin Reed
		patches to make Mono run on MacOS X out of the box.

	* IsolatedStorage

		The initial implementation of it was done by Jonathan
		Pryor and included in this release.

	* Compilers:

		More work on the Mono Visual Basic compiler (it is now
		included in the packages).

		Plenty of bug fixes from Jackson, Miguel to the C#
		compiler.

		Patches from Francesco and Daniel to the VB.NET
		support runtime.

	* Debugger support

		Plenty of updates to run the new Mono Debugger from Martin.

* Main missing bits:

   Some of everyone's favorite patches or code chunks have not yet
been integrated, hopefully Mono 0.20 will have them:

	* Zoltan's patch to run IKVM is not yet on this release

	* Some parts of Patrik's remoting code did not make it to the
	  release either.

	* Reggie's MySQL native provider is also missing.

Enjoy!
Miguel.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone!

   We have made a new release of Mono available.  Despite the fact
that we just did Mono 0.18, this release is packed with new features.

* Availability.

   Mono 0.19 is available in package format from:

	http://www.go-mono.com/download.html

   We released packages for SuSE 8.0, Mandrake 8.2, Debian and various
Red Hat releases.  It is also available from Red Carpet on the Mono
channel.

   Source code for Mono, MCS, the Mono Debugger, XSP is available as
well from that web page. 

* New in this release

	* Remoting news:

		Lluis has implemented and documented the Binary formatter
		Woohoo!  He has done a lot of work as well to support
		remoting.

		Patrik has also been working heavily on fixing a
		number of remoting related bugs and missing features.

		Ajay also implemented 1-d array serialization in System.Xml

	* New database provider: IBM DB2

		Christopher Bockner has contributed a DB2 data
		provider for System.Data.  We have a very complete
		range of data providers.
		
	* System.Web.Mobile

		Gaurav has started work on this assembly, this will
		allow us to run the unmodified reference ASP.NET
		applications that were designed to support Mobile
		browsing.

	* System.Data and System.XML:

		More implementation work on XmlDataDocument from Ville
		and plenty of fixes from Atsushi.

	* MacOS patches:

		Paolo integrated John Duncan's and Benjamin Reed
		patches to make Mono run on MacOS X out of the box.

	* IsolatedStorage

		The initial implementation of it was done by Jonathan
		Pryor and included in this release.

	* Compilers:

		More work on the Mono Visual Basic compiler (it is now
		included in the packages).

		Plenty of bug fixes from Jackson, Miguel to the C#
		compiler.

		Patches from Francesco and Daniel to the VB.NET
		support runtime.

	* Debugger support

		Plenty of updates to run the new Mono Debugger from Martin.

* Main missing bits:

   Some of everyone's favorite patches or code chunks have not yet
been integrated, hopefully Mono 0.20 will have them:

	* Zoltan's patch to run IKVM is not yet on this release

	* Some parts of Patrik's remoting code did not make it to the
	  release either.

	* Reggie's MySQL native provider is also missing.

Enjoy!
Miguel.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Happy new year!

        The Mono team is proud to release Mono 0.18, with plenty of bug
        fixes and improvements.  If you are a happy 0.17 user, this
        release is a happiness extension release.  Many bugs in the
	runtime, class libraries and C# compiler have been fixed.
    
        Also, our special envoy in Japan has reported that there is
        some naming confussion about the naming of Mono, as can be
        seen in the following documentary material:
    
        Atsushi Enomoto shows the source of confussion:
    
    	http://primates.ximian.com/~duncan/gallery/Duncan-in-Tokyo/DSCN0702
    
        Nick and Duncan echo it:
    
    	http://primates.ximian.com/~duncan/gallery/Duncan-in-Tokyo/DSCN0703
    
* Availability

	Mono 0.18 packages and source code is available for download from:

		http://www.go-mono.com/download.html

	Those using Red Carpet on Linux can install Mono 0.18 from
        the Mono channel.  The packages have already been pushed for
        you.

	At release time we have packages for Red Hat 8.0, 7.3,
    	7.2 and 7.1 and Mandrake 8.2.

* Contributors to this release

	This release is brought to you by:

	Alejandro Sanchez, Alp Toker, Atsushi Enomoto, Cesar Octavio
	Lopez Netaren, Daniel Lopez (mod_mono), Daniel Morgan, Dennis
	Hayes, Dick Porter, Dietmar Maurer, Duncan Mak, Eduardo
	Garcia, Gaurav Vaish, Gonzalo Paniagua, Jackson Harper, Jaime
	Anguiano, Jeroen Janssen, Johannes Roith, Jonathan Pryor, Juli
	Mallett, Lluis Sanchez, Marco Ridoni, Martin Baulig, Miguel de
	Icaza, Nick Drochak, Paolo Molaro, Patrik Torstensson, Piers
	Haken, Rachel Hestilow, Rafael Teixeira, Ravi Pratap,
	Sebastian Pouliot, Tim Coleman, Tim Hayes, Ville Palo, Zoltan
	Varga.

* New in this release

	VB.NET compiler:
        
		Many improvements to the Mono VB.NET compiler.

	ASP.NET:

		Plenty of bug fixes in ASP.NET.  Larger applications
	        can now be run with it.  The authentication system has
	        been deployed, most changes are from Gonzalo.

		We have a modified IBuySpy running (without Xslt)

		If you want to run ASP.NET you can run it with either
		our XSP proof-of-concept server, or with Daniel's
		Apache module that can be fetched from CVS (module
		name: mod_apache)

	Type Reflector:
		
		A Console, Gtk# and Windows.Forms tool to browse
		compiled assemblies and examine the types on it, from
		Jonathan Pryor.

	Moving to NUnit 2.0 

		Nick continues the work on moving our test suite to NUnit 2.0 

	Mobile.Controls:

		Gaurav has started work on the Mobile controls, which
		are required to run some of the reference applications
		in full-mode like IBuySpy.

	Remoting:

		The remoting infrastructure has got a big boost from
		Lluis in this release.

	System.Data/XML

		Ville has been working on improving our System.Data
		classes in the XML assembly. 

	Crypto:

		Plenty of new crypto from Sebastien as well.  A new
		web page in our	site can be used to track this.

			http://www.go-mono.com/crypto.html


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello!

	Version 0.17 of Mono has been released.

	There are plenty of new features, bug fixes, new classes, 
	performance improvements, optimizations and much more
	available in this release.

* Stats

	2605 cvs commits to the Mono repository since October 1st, an
	average of 37 commits per day including weekends.  

	212 commits to the Mono module.
	1438 commits to the MCS module.

* Mono Improvements:

	Work has begun to make the runtime run a finalizer thread and
	invoke all the finalizers from this thread.  This is the same
	behavior as Java and the Microsoft runtime, but it is disabled
	on this build.

	Integrated the s390 work from Neale Ferguson.

	Beginning of the work for pre-compiling code (Ahead of time
	compilation) for Mono (based on the early work of Zoltan).

	New option `--noboundscheck' for benchmark purposes, it
	disables array bound checks.
	
	Uses mmap instead of SysV shared memory for the Windows API
	emulation layer.

	Plenty of bug fixes, improvements and integration with the
	upper layer class libraries.

	New exception handling code uses the GCC native support for
	stack-walking if available and gives big performance boost
	(15% on mcs bootstrap).

	A lot of the work in the new release of Mono is required for
	the Mono Debugger (which will be released separately).  The
	Mono debugger is interesting, because it can debug both
	managed and unmanaged applications, but it only supports the
	JITer for debugging.

	Dick, Dietmar, Gonzalo, Martin and Paolo were in charge of
	most of these changes.

* Compiler improvements:

	Many bug fixes as usual, better C# compliancy.

	Performance improvements.  The new release of the Mono C#
	compiler is 37% faster than the previous version (self-compile
	is down to 8 seconds).  On my P4 1.8Ghz machine, the Mono C#
	compiler compiles (342,000 lines per minute).

	Thanks to go Ravi and Martin for helping out with the bug
	fixing hunt.

* Cryptography and Security classes

	Sebastien Pouliot and Andrew Birkett were extremely busy
	during the past two months working on the cryptography
	classes, many of the crypto providers are now working

	Jackson on the other hand helped us with the security
	classes, he said about those:

	`Writing security classes is the most exciting thing I have
	ever done, I can not wait to write more of them'.

* ASP.NET:

	We have now moved the code from the XSP server (which was our
	test bed for ASP.NET) into the right classes inside
	System.Web, and now any web server that was built by using the
	System.Web hosting interfaces can be used with Mono.

	The sample XSP server still exists, but it is now just a
	simple implementation of the WorkerRequest and ApplicationHost
	classes and can be used to test drive ASP.NET.  A big thanks
	goes to Gonzalo who worked on this night and day (mostly
	night).

	Gaurav keeps helping us with the Web.Design classes, and
	improving the existing web controls. 

* ADO.NET:

	New providers are available in this release.  The relentless
	System.Data team (Brian, Dan, Rodrigo, Tim and Ville) are
	hacking non-stop on the databse code.  Improving existing
	providers, and new providers.  

	The new providers on this release:

		* Oracle
		* MS SQL 
		* ODBC
		* Sybase
		* Sqlite (for embedded use).

	Many regression tests have been added as well (Ville has been
	doing a great job here).

	Brian also created a DB provider multiplexor (The ProviderFactory)

	Stuart Caborn contributed Writing XML from a DataSet.
	Luis Fernandez contributed constraint handling code.

	Also there is new a Gtk# GUI tool from Dan that can be used to
	try out various providers.

* System.XML:

	Atsushi has taken the lead in fixing and plugging the missing
	parts of the System.XML namespace, many fixes, many
	improvements.

* CodeDom and the C# provider.

	Jackson Harper has been helping us with the various interface
	classes from the CodeDOM to the C# compiler, in this release
	a new assembly joins us: Cscompmgd.  It is a simple assembly,
	and hence Microsoft decided not to waste an entire "System"
	"dot" on it.  

* Testing

	Nick Drochak has integrated the new NUnit 2.0 system.

* Monograph:

	Monograph now has a --stats option to get statistics on
	assembly code.
	

CVS Contributors to this release:

	Alejandro Sanchez, Alp Toker, Andrew Birkett, Atsushi Enomoto,
	Brian Ritchie, Cesar Octavio Lopez Nataren, Chris Toshok,
	Daniel Morgan, Daniel Stodden, Dennis Hayes, Dick Porter,
	Diego Sevilla, Dietmar Maurer, Duncan Mak, Eduardo Garcia,
	Ettore Perazzoli, Gaurav Vaish, Gonzalo Paniagua, Jackson
	Harper, Jaime Anguiano, Johannes Roith, John Sohn, Jonathan
	Pryor, Kristian Rietveld, Mads Pultz, Mark Crichton, Martin
	Baulig, Martin Willemoes Hansen, Miguel de Icaza, Mike
	Kestner, Nick Drochak, Nick Zigarovich, Paolo Molaro, Patrik
	Torstensson, Phillip Pearson, Piers Haken, Rachel Hestilow,
	Radek Doulik, Rafael Teixeira, Ravi Pratap, Rodrigo Moya,
	Sebastien Pouliot, Tim Coleman, Tim Haynes, Ville Palo,
	Vladimir Vukicevic, and Zoltan Varga.

	(Am sorry, I could not track everyone from the ChangeLog
	messages, I apologize in advance for the missing
	contributors).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello!

	Version 0.16 of Mono has been released!  This is mostly a bug
	fix release, a lot of work has been going on to make existing
	features more robust and less buggy.   Also, contributions are
	too varied, so it is hard to classify them in groups.

* Stats

        795 commits to mono and mcs since August 23rd.

* News

        The changes that got in this releases are mostly
        bugfixes.  Miguel, Martin and Ravi attacked lots of bugs in the
        compiler, Dick fixed a bunch of bugs related to processes and
        threads.  Mark Crichton resumed his work on the SPARC port and
        made lots of progress there.  Juli Mallett has been working on
        making sure Mono also builds on BSD systems.  As usual, Dietmar
        and Paolo supplied their continuous stream of fixes to the
        runtime.

        Dietmar has completed the work on the runtime side for
        remoting support and we ship now with a sample channel, the
        System.Runtime.Remoting.Sample.  This can be used as a
        reference implementation for anyone interested in implementing
        other channels (like a CORBA channel).  

	Duncan got preliminary XSLT support done by using
        libxslt.  

	Gonzalo (with some help from Patrik) has been working hard
        making our ASP.NET implementation work on both Mono and MS by
        migrating the existing xsp code to the class library.  Gaurav
        started working on the classes in System.Design.dll and Chris
        Toshok checked in Mono.Directory.LDAP, which will be the
        foundation to implement the System.DirectoryServices assembly.

        Various fixes from Kral, Jason, Piers and Gonzalo were
	committed to System.Xml; Martin Algiers reports that the
	upcoming NAnt release will be fully compatible with Mono.

        Miguel imported Sergey Chaban's Mono.PEToolkit and ilasm code
        to CVS.  Nick, as always, continues to refine our testing
        framework by improving our tests.  Andrew Birkett continues to
        improve the implementation of our security/cryptographic
        classes.  Jonathan Pryor contributed type-reflector the our
        list of tools.

* Other News From Behind de Curtain.

	While the above is pretty impressive on its own, various other
	non-released portions of Mono have been undergoing: Adam Treat
	has been leading the effort to document our class libraries
	and produce the tools required for it.

	Martin Baulig has been working on the Mono Debugger which is
	not being released yet.  This debugger allows both native
	Linux application as well as CIL applications to be debugged
	at the same time (and in fact, you can use this to debug the
	JIT engine).  The debugger is written in C# with some C glue

	In the meant A new JIT engine is under development, focused on
	adding more of the high-end optimizations which will be
	integrated on an ahead-of-time-compiler.   Dietmar and Paolo
	have been working on this.

* Contributors to this release

      * Non-Ximian developers: Adam Treat, Andrew Birkett, Dennis
        Hayes, Diego Sevilla, Franklin Wise, Gaurav Vaish ,Jason
        Diamond, Johannes Roith, John Sohn, Jonathan Pryor, Juli
        Mallett, Kral Ferch, Mike Crichton, Nick Drochak, Nick
        Zigarovich, Piers Haken, Rafael Teixeira, Ricardo Fernandez
        Pascual, Sergey Chaban, Tim Coleman.

      * Ximian developers: Dietmar, Paolo, Dick, Duncan, Ravi,
        Miguel, Martin, Chris, Joe, Gonzalo, Rodrigo.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	* Sergey Chaban added thread-safe support to
	  System.Collections.SortedList.
	
	* Fixes to the compiler by Andrew Birkett.
	
	* Tim Coleman contributed the OleDb provider for System.Data and started
	  work on System.Web.Services.
	
	* Radek fixed a lot of problems on the PPC side. [*]
	
	* Miguel and Martin committed the new type lookup system.
	
	* Dietmar rewrote the marshalling code. [*]
	
	* Peter Williams and Martin contributed the new Makefiles, with help
	from Alp Toker as well.
	
* Contributors to this release:

	* Non-Ximian developers: Nick Drochak, Martin Baulig, Tim
	  Coleman, Mike Kestner, Alp Toker, Jonathan Pryor, Jaime
	  Anguiano, Piers Haken, Rafael Teixeira, Mark Crichton,
	  Sergey Chabon, Ajay Kumar Dwivedi, Andrew Birkett, Dennis
	  Hayes (SWF), Adam Treat, Johannes Roith and Lawrence Pit.

	* Ximian developers: Duncan, Ravi, Dick, Dietmar, Paolo,
	  Gonzalo, Rachel, Radek, Rodrigo, Jeff, Peter Williams and
	  Miguel.

Special thanks to Duncan for helping me put this release together.

Hello!

	A new version of Mono (0.12), is out.

	Mono is an open source implementation of the Microsoft.NET
	Framework, and ships with a C# compiler, a runtime engine
	(with a JIT on x86 cpus) and a set of class libraries.

	Mono is know to work on a number of platforms:
	x86/Linux, x86/Windows, x86/FreeBSD; sparc/solaris;
	linuxppc/linux; strongarm/linux.

	There have been many changes since the last release of Mono in
	late April, thanks to Duncan for assembling the list of new
	features, any omissions are my fault.

Changes since 0.11:

	It is hard to keep track of the changes, as there are 1632
	patches that were posted to the mailing list.  One third of
	the total number of patches since we opened mono-patches
	list.  I am sure I missed some stuff and probably missed some
	contributors.  I apologize in advance.

	Runtime:

		Paolo: New Reflection.Emit generation code generates
		code that can be executed in Windows.  Now binaries
		generated by Mono/MCS will run on Windows.

		Paolo got Activator.CreateInstance to work.

		Sergey's CPU-optimization for CPBLK.

		Many many bug fixes to the runtime from Dick, Dan
		Lewis, Dietmar, Gonzalo, Martin, Paolo, Radek and Sergey,

	Compiler:

		Many bug fixes: The compiler can now compile Gtk#,
		Vorbis#, System.Data assembly and System.Xml assembly
		which previously did not work (Dietmar, Miguel, Paolo,
		Piers, Ravi, Miguel).  Thanks to all the bug
		reporters.

	Class Libraries:

		Mike started work on System.Xml.XPath

		Christian, Dennis, Daniel and friends got more stubs
		for System.Windows.Forms in.

		Ajay revamped System.Xml.Schema.  And Jason and Duncan
		updated System.Xml

		Daniel also checked in a working CodeDOM
		implementation and a C# provider.

		Many bug fixes by everyone.  Thanks to Daniel, Duncan,
		Jonathan, Lawrence, Martin Mike, Nick and Piers.  I am
		missing a lot of contributors that should be listed.

	ASP.NET support

		A lot of work from Gonzalo allows some small and
		modest ASP.NET applications to run (you still need the
		unreleased XSP code though).

	System.Data:

		Integrated the MySQL provider from Brad Merryl.

		Lots of work by Dan, Rodrigo, Tim.

	Microsoft.VisualBasic runtime support

		Rafael and Chris have been working on the VisualBasic
		runtime support DLLs

Hello everyone!

	Mono 0.11 is out!

	This new version has new features:

	* Massive:

		* Ultrich Kunitz implemented the whole calendar set of
		  classes.  Yes, thats right.  The whole thing, with a
		  complete test suite.  Thanks Ultrich!

	* JIT/runtime features:

		* Martin's debugging framework is included (see web
		  site for details on how to use it). (Martin)

		* Transparent Proxy has been implemented for the
		  runtime (lets you run/debug/hack on remoting for Mono) (Dietmar)

		* Inline and constant folding/propagation support
		  in the JIT engine (Dietmar)

		* Profiling support for the JIT engine (--profile).

	* Cool runtime hacks, that made our compiler twice as fast:

		* New string rewrite: faster, speedier, leaner, cooler!

		  Paolo had been talking about a new string rewrite,
		  and super hacker Patrik Torstensson started the
		  implementation, Dietmar then switched the object
		  layout and the Mono team helped iron out a few of
		  the details.

		* New array reprensetation: Dan Lewis contributed a new
		  faster and smaller array implementation.

		* Improved Reflection.Emit: Paolo improved our
		  reflection emit code.

	* ADO.NET

		* Daniel Morgan, Rodrigo Moya have some pieces of the
		  Sql classes ready to run.  he first signs of life
		  this week (we can connect, insert rows; do transactions:
		  commit/rollback; SQL errors and exceptions work).

	* Http Runtime

		* The HTTP runtime (to be used by our ASP.NET implementation)
		  was contributed by Patrik Torstensson.  Patrik not only
		  contributed a massive ammount of classes, but he immediately
		  went on to implement ThreadPools and then helped out with the
		  new String rewrite.

	* XML improvements:

		* Kral Ferch and Duncan Mak contributed more
		  improvements to the XML implementation.

		* Work on Xml Serialization from John Donagher.
	
	* Documentation:

		* MonoDoc ships for the first time!
		  (John Barnette, Adam Treat and John Sohn)

		* New documentation stubs ready to be filled, and translated
		  included (thanks to our doc team!)

	* General fixes:

		* Piers Haken fixed many of our attributes and many
		  little problems that were exposed by his CorCompare tool

		* Many Mono C# compiler bug fixes.

	* Other improvements:

		* NUnit works on Linux! (Patrik Torstensson)

		* More NUnit tests (Nick Drochak)

		* Windows.Forms progress: Dennis Hayes and Christian
		  Meyer have been contributing stubs for the
		  Windows.Forms work.

		* Full Parse implementations and bug fixing by Gonzalo

		* Dan Lewis contributed some missing classes for the
		  Regexp implementation.

		* Jonathan's trace classes

* This Month's Mono is brought to you by:

	Adam Treat, Chris Podugriel, Christian Meyer, Daniel Lewis,
	Daniel Morgan, Dennis Hayes, Dick Porter, Dietmar Maurer,
	Duncan Mak, Guarav Vaish, Gonzalo Paniagua, Jaime Anguiano,
	Jason Diamond, Joe Shaw, John Barnette, John Donagher, John
	Sohn, Jonathan Pryor, Kral Ferch, Martin Baulig, Miguel de
	Icaza, Mike Kestner, Nick Drochak, Paolo Molaro, Patrik
	Tostensson, Piers Haken, Ravi Pratap, Rodrigo Moya, Sergey
	Chanben, Ultrich Kunitz, Wictor Wilen.

	I know that I missed some features, there is a lot of work
	that happens in a month.  I apologize in advance for any
	features I omited by accident.  

	Special thanks go to Duncan for helping out with all those
	little details in the project.  And also Nick who has been
	keeping us in good shape by maintaining and helping new
	contributors provide more test suites.

* Reporting bugs

	If you find a bug in Mono, please file a bug here:

		http://bugzilla.ximian.com

	That way we wont loose your bug report, and will be able to
	follow up properly with it.  Also try to provide simple test
	cases whenever possible and try as hard as possible to
	identify the root of a problem (compiler, runtime, class
	libraries).

* Forum

	The [email protected] mailing list is open for
	those of you who want to discuss the future of Mono.

Hello everyone!  

  	Mono "Self Hosting" 0.10 is out!  (Alex insisted I used the
	<blink> tag for "Self Hosting", but was dissapointed when he
	realized most mailers dont support this).

	Too many things have happened since the the 0.9 release,
	almost an entire month.  The big news is that we are shipping
	a the self-hosting Mono C# compiler.  This has been tested on
	Linux/x86 only.

	Also, we delayed the release for one reason or other, but it
	turns out that as a extra bonus, Paolo fixed the last
	outstanding bug in the JIT engine, so the compiler now runs in
	the JIT engine instead of the interpreter.

	The mono-0.10 release includes the libraries required to run
	the compiler as well as assorted .NET programs [1].

* What is new

	There is so much stuff in this release that is hard to keep
	track of it.  

	Jason, Kral and Duncan have done an amazing job with
	System.Xml, up to the point that it is even being used by
	gtk-sharp's code generator (and it all comes with great test
	suites to verify that it works!).  Ajay's XmlSchema code is
	also shipped.

	Martin worked on our debugging infrastructure (the JIT can
	load dwarf files, and our class libraries now generate dwarf
	debugging info;  we are in the process of adding this to the
	compiler, the patch did not make it to this release though).

	For the first time the System.Web assembly has built without
	all the excludes, so you can get your hands on Gaurav and
	Lee's massive code base.

	Lots of new tests to the runtime, class libraries and compiler
	are included.  As always, big thanks go to Nick for continued
	guidance to new developers, and writing new tests.

	Dan removed the System.PAL dependency, we now have moved to an
	internalcall setup for all the System.IO calls, and dropped
	the MonoWrapper shared library.

	Porting wise: Sergey's StrongARM port is included now; Jeff's
	SPARC port and Radek's PowerPC port have been updated to
	reflect the new changes in the engine.

	Runtime wise: Dietmar also got us asyncronous delegates
	implemented.  Dick continues his work on our foundation
	classes, and has resumed his work on the IO layer.  

	Paolo is the hero behind self hosting on Linux.  Send your
	congrats (and wine) to him.

	And without the help from Mike, Duco, David, Piers, Nick,
	Sergey, Mark, Jonathan, John, Adam and Dennis this release
	would have not been possible.

	This release is mostly ECMA compatible.  I did not expect this
	to happen so soon.  I am very grateful to everyone who has
	made this happen

* The goods

	The runtime sources and binaries to the compiler/libraries:

		http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.10.tar.gz

	The class and compiler sources:

		http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.10.tar.gz

* Requirements:

	You still need glib-2, and pkg-config.  If you plan on
	compiling large applications, getting the Boehm GC is a plus
	(we will integrate this in a future version, for now it is an
	external requirement).

	Boehm GC is available in packaged format for Debian and Red
	Hat systems.

* To compile on Linux

	Do your regular chores with mono-0.10.tar.gz, you know the
	drill.  In the end, after you reach the `make install' phase,
	now you can do some cool stuff.

	If you want to compile the compiler (just to try it out),
	untar the sources to the compiler (mcs-0.10.tar.gz) and do
	manually:
	
		cd mcs-0.10
		(cd jay; make)
		(cd mcs; make monomcs)

	Now you will end up with a nice mcs4.exe in the mcs/mcs
	directory, that is the compiler.  If you want to use that,
	replace the mcs.exe we distribute with the mcs4.exe you got.

* Gadgets

	Man pages for mcs, mono and mint are included for your
	enjoyment.  

	Particularly of interest is `mint --profile' which is awesome
	to profile your application, the output is very useful.

	Also, if you want to impress your friends, you might want to
	run the JIT with the `-d' flag, that shows you how the JITer
	compiles the code (and shows the basic blocks and the forst of
	trees as it goes).

* Next steps

	More classes are missing.  These are required so we can run
	nant and nunit natively.  Once we achieve that, we will be
	able to ship a complete environment that compiles on Linux.
	
	Currently our makefiles still use csc, as we still need
	nunit/nant to work.

[1] Of course, .NET programs that try to use classes we have not yet
implemented, will be left wondering `why did this happen to me?'.  

Hello!

	I have just uploaded Mono 0.9 to the web server, you can get
	the goodies here:

		http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.9.tar.gz
		http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.9.tar.gz

	mono-0.9.tar.gz contains the source code to the runtime (JIT
	and interpreter) as well as a pre-compiled version of the
	compiler (mcs.exe) and the class libraries.

	To compile the compiler and the class libraries, you still
	need Windows with the .NET SDK, as our runtime can not host
	the compiler completely yet.

* Improved Build System

	You can check http://www.go-mono.com/download.html for the
	new and fresh compilation instructions.  Same requirements as
	the last version (pkg-config, glib 1.3.xx need to be
	installed). 

* What is new:

	Compiler can compile about 75% of our regression test suite
	on Linux.  Most of this work is on the class libraries and
	Paolo has been the magician behind the work here.

	JIT can run the compiler now (Dietmar)
	
	Mint works on Windows now (Dick).

	Application Domains have been implemented (Dietmar)

		* Two modes of operation are available, depending on
		  your needs: share code, or maximize speed (does not
		  share code).  This is described by the the
		  LoaderOptimization enumeration in .NET.

	Corlib no longer has references to mscorlib (Daniel Lewis)

	Ports:
		PowerPC has been updated (Radek Doulik)
		New SPARC port (Jeffrey Stedfast)

	Documentation system:
		Adam Treat has been working on finishing the Doctools
		to maintain the Mono class library documentation.  We
		still need a GUI editor though.

	Tracking progress:
		Nick's new tools to track progress are included in
		this release.

	Many new more regression tests for the class library
		(David Brandt, Mark Crichton, Nick Drochak, Bob Doan,
		 Duco Fijma).

	Lots of new code:
		Gaurav Vaish (the hacking god behind System.Web),
		Chris Podugriel (System.Data) and Mark Crichton (Crypto)

	Runtime:
		Socket layer is finished (Dick Porter)

	Compiler has full support for unsafe code now (Miguel)
		Still a few things missing: constant folding is not 
		finished everywhere and access permissions are not
		enforced yet.
	
	Many many many bug fixes everywhere from everyone on the team:

		Paolo Molaro, Daniel Lewis, Daniel Stodden, Dietmar
		Maurer, Jeff Stedfast, Nick Drochak, Duco Fijma, Ravi Pratap,
		Dick Porter, Duncan Mak, Jeff Stedfast and Miguel de Icaza.

	I am sorry if I left a major component out of the
	announcement, this were some intense 11 days of work.

* What is obviously missing

	Currently our System.Reflection.Emit is lacking array and
	pointer support, which is why many programs still do not
	compile, but this should be taken care of next week.

* How can you help

	There are many ways to help the project, check the details
	documentation in:

		http://www.go-mono.com/contributing.html

	You might also want to stop by our IRC channel on
	irc.gnome.org, channel #mono if you are interested in
	contributing.

Have a happy weekend!
Miguel.

Hey guys!

   Mono 0.7 has been released. 

   It has been a long time since the last release of Mono (almost
three weeks).  We have made an incredible ammount of work in the past
three weeks.  

* Highlights of this release:

	* The monoburg: BURS-instruction selector implemented (for our
	  portable JIT engine).

	* JIT engine works for very simple programs (Fibonacci works
	  for instance).  It is about 30% faster running than the
	  equivalent code compiled with Kaffe.

	  The interesting part is that this was accomplished with the
	  a minimum register allocator, and very simple monoburg
	  rules, so there is a *lot* of room to improve here.

	* The Interpreter has madured a lot.  Value Types are fully
	  supported now;  We dropped the FFI dependency, as we now
	  have our own code generator.

	* The runtime has been expanded and extended as to support
	  real file I/O (including console I/O).  So Hello World works
	  in there. 

	* The compiler can generate code for most statements now; It
	  also performs semantic analysis on most expressions.
	  Creation of new objects is supported, access to parameters,
	  fields and local variables works.  Method invocation works.
	  Implicit type conversions, assignments and much more.

	  Operator overloading is implemented, but broken on this
	  release, hopefully this will be fixed soon.

	  Delegates and Attributes are now declared and passed around,
	  but no code generation for those exist yet.

	* More classes (look for details).  Sergey and Paolo have been
	  working on various classes in System.Reflection.Emit to get
	  the compiler self-hosting.

	* NUnit is now part of the distribution, so it should be
	  trivial to write test cases (and if you want to help out,
	  this is one way to do it, we really need more tests cases).

    I am going to try to switch to Nick's JB for C# this week or next
week.  But the excitement of having the compiler deal with real C#
programs is too much to be contained, and I can not keep my hands of
the code generation in the compiler.

* Availability:

	  http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mono-0.7.tar.gz
	  http://www.go-mono.com/archive/mcs-0.7.tar.gz

* Details

  Class Library Changes:

  Many enumerations have been revamped to have the same value
definitions as those in .NET as those cause problems.  They were also
missing the [Flags] attributes, so we got that right too. 

    * System
	  SerializableAttribute impl			 (Miguel)
	  String updates                                 (Jeff)
	  System.Char					 (Ravi)

    * System.Configuration
	  ConfigurationSettings impl                     (Christopher Podurgiel)
	  SingleTagSectionHandler impl                   (Christopher Podurgiel)
	  DictionarySectionHandler impl                  (Christopher Podurgiel)

    * System.Collections.Specialized
	  NameObjectCollectionBase impl			 (Nick Drochak)

    * System.Diagnostics
	  StackFrame stubs				 (alexk)
	  StackTrace stubs				 (alexk)

    * System.IO
	  File stubs                                     (Jim Richardson)
	  IOException impl                               (Paolo)	
	  StreamWriter impl				 (Dietmar)
	  StreamReader stubs				 (Dietmar)

    * System.Net
	  ConnectionModes				 (Miguel)
	  ProxyUseType					 (Miguel)
	  WebStatus					 (Miguel)

    * System.Reflection
	  Assembly (stubs)				 (Paolo)
	  MethodBase					 (Paolo)
	  MethodInfo					 (Paolo)

    * System.Reflection.Emit
	  EventToken					 (Sergey)
	  FieldToken					 (Sergey)
	  FlowControl					 (Sergey)
	  ILGenerator (stubbed)				 (Paolo)
	  Label 					 (Paolo)
	  MethodToken					 (Sergey)
	  OpCode.cs					 (Sergey)
	  OpCodeType					 (Sergey)
	  OpCodes.cs					 (Sergey)
	  OperandType					 (Sergey)
	  PEFileKinds					 (Paolo)
	  PackingSize					 (Sergey)
	  ParameterToken				 (Sergey)
	  PropertyToken					 (Sergey)
	  SignatureToken				 (Sergey)
	  StackBehaviour				 (Sergey)
	  StringToken					 (Sergey)
	  TypeToken					 (Sergey)

    * System.Threading

	  Most classes stubbed out by Dick Porter        (Dick)

    * System.Web
	  HttpWorkerRequest stubs			 (Bob Smith)

    * System.Web.Hosting				 (Bob Smith)
	  AppDomainFactory stubs			 (Bob Smith)
	  ApplicationHost stubs				 (Bob Smith)
	  IAppDomainFactory stubs			 (Bob Smith)
	  IISAPIRuntime	stubs				 (Bob Smith)
	  ISAPIRuntime stubs				 (Bob Smith)
	  SimpleWorkerRequest stubs			 (Bob Smith)

    * System.Web.UI
	  LiteralControl implemented                     (Bob Smith)
	  HtmlContainerControl bugfixes                  (Bob Smith)
	  BuildMethod 
	  BuildTemplateMethod 
	  HtmlTextWriterAttribute 
	  HtmlTextWriterStyle 
	  HtmlTextWriterTag 
	  IAttributeAccessor 
	  IDataBindingsAccessor 
	  INamingContainer 
	  IParserAccessor 
	  IPostBackDataHandler 
	  IPostBackEventHandler 
	  IStateManager 
	  ITagNameToTypeMapper 
	  ITemplate 
	  IValidator 
	  ImageClickEventHandler 
	  OutputCacheLocation 
	  PersistanceMode 
	  StateItem 

    * System.Web.UI.HtmlControls
	  HtmlAnchor impl				 (Leen Teolen)
	  HtmlTextArea impl				 (Leen Teolen)

    * System.Web.UI.WebControls
	  WebControl.cs                                  (Gaurav Vaish)

    * System.XML
	  Lots of enumerations				 (Miguel)
	  (will add later)

    * Add loads of enumerations throughout 		 (Sergey)
      (will add later)

Compiler Changes:

    * Assignment					 (Miguel)

    * expression semantic analysis			 (Miguel)

    * constructor creation, chaining			 (Miguel)

    * Unified error reporting                            (Ravi)

    * initial attribute support				 (Ravi)

    * calling convention support                         (Miguel)

    * loop construct code generation                     (Miguel)

    * conditional statement code generation		 (Miguel)

    * indexer declarations				 (Ravi)

    * event declarations				 (Ravi)

    * try/catch parsing fixed				 (Ravi)

    * initial delegate support				 (Ravi)

    * operator overload                                  (Ravi)

Tools Changes:

    * Add NUnit windows binaries to distribution	 (Nick Drochak, Miguel)

Runtime Changes:

    * First JIT implementation                           (Dietmar, Paolo)

    * value type size calculation                        (Dietmar)

    * full value type support                            (Paolo)

    * frequently used types cache                        (Paolo)

    * FileStream support				 (Paolo)

    * Console input/output support			 (Dietmar)

    * print arguments and exception name in stack trace  (Paolo)

    * beginnings of virtual call support                 (Paolo)

    * reimplement pinvoke support			 (Dietmar)

    * remove libffi dependency				 (Dietmar)

    * IBURG code generator implementation		 (Dietmar)

    * new opcodes implemented: starg.s, ldobj, isinst,   (Paolo, Miguel)
      ldarg, starg, ldloc, ldloca, stloc, initobj, 
      cpblk, sizeof, conv.i, conv.i1, conv.i2, conv.i4, 
      conv.i8, conv.u1, conv.u2, conv.u4, conv.r4, 
      conv.r8, ldelema, ceq, cgt, clt.

* This list

    Parts of this list of features were compiled by Alex by following
the CVS mailing list.  My deepest thanks to Alex for helping me out
with this.  I want to apologize for the missing features that I did
not document here, Mono is moving too fast to keep track of all the
changes. 

2002-Feb-11 Miguel de Icaza  <[email protected]>

	New release, functional x86-JIT, x86 interpreter, ppc interpreter 

	Class libraries ship.

	Limited compiler ships.

	Too many changes to list

2001-07-12  Miguel de Icaza  <[email protected]>

	New XSLT file from Sergey Chaban for CIL opcodes

	Paolo got the beginning of an interpreter in.

	Further work on the dissasembler.

	Fix various parts of the metadata library

2001-05-30  Miguel de Icaza  <[email protected]>

	Project started