* Contributing to the Mono project
There are many ways in which you can help in the Mono project:
Those are just broad things that need to be worked on, but
something that would help tremendously would be to help with
small duties in the project that need to be addressed.
You can see what needs to be done in the class libraries here
** To start contributing
To start developing classes or to contribute to the compiler,
you only need Windows and the .NET Framework 1.0 SDK. Please notice
that you do not need Visual Studio (although you can use it if
you want). The .NET Framework SDK requires some version of
Windows XP or Windows NT. If you are running Windows 98, 95
or Me, you could use instead the .NET Redist package, but it
lacks the documentation browser and the ildasm program (C#, VB, JScript and IL
assembler are included).
You can get it here
If you are new to .NET, writing regression tests is a good way
of starting to contribute: it will help you get used to C# as
well as getting comfortable with the .NET APIs.
This helps because at this point you might be the best
qualified person to fix a problem found by the regression
test, or you might have a new class to implement in the .NET
world that only has a test suite.
To get started writing tests see the Test Suite
section.
** Bug reporting
If you find bugs in Mono, please make sure you enter a bug
report so we can keep track of problems in Mono.
To enter bug reports go to
http://bugzilla.ximian.com and enter bug reports against
your favorite component (Mono, Runtime, C# compiler).
You can review the list of current bugs by going here
** Small tasks
A few smaller tasks are here, dropped in no particular order:
* Mono/doc and web site: They need to be
packaged up in the official `distribution'
* Adding serialization support to all the classes.
We have many classes, but we have not implemented in
many cases the serialization and re-incarnation support in
them (this is pretty straight forward code, and simple,
but there is a lot to be done here).
* Emacs support
Brad Merryl's C# mode for Emacs is available: http://www.cybercom.net/~zbrad/DotNet/Emacs/
* Books on C# and DotNet.
* Special note
If you have looked at Microsoft's implementation of .NET or
their shared source code, you may not be able to contribute
to Mono. Details will follow when we know more about this.
In general be careful when you are implementing free software
and you have access to proprietary code. We need to make sure
that we are not using someone else's copyrighted code
accidentally.
Please do not use the ildasm program to disassemble
proprietary code when you are planning to reimplement a class
for Mono. If you have done this, we might not be able to use
your code.
Please stick to published documentation for implementing any
classes.