+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
projects / mono.git / commitdiff