DotGNU is offering $4,500 in prize money to people who write code for the Portable. NET Project's implementation of System.Windows.Forms (SWF). Version 0.5.12 of Portable.NET has also been released and is being prepared for the DotGNU 0.1 CD release. Mono continues to improve with the release of 0.27.

Contest!
Neil Cawse has generously donated $4,500 to fund a programming contest for the Portable.NET implementation of SWF. The Free Software Foundation will be administering the contest, and the money is in their bank account. There are 15 prizes: 5 for top coders, and 10 randomly drawn from all participants. The prizes are First Prize, $2000; Second Prize, $600; Third Prize, $400; Fourth Prize, $300; and Fifth Prize, $200. In addition, 10 participants will be selected at random for $100 prizes (limited to one per programmer).

The top coder prizes will be based on quantity and quality/difficulty of code, along with how much the coder supports the community (especially newcomers) on IRC, the wiki, etc. The contest is scheduled to end on December 26, but can end earlier if the judges decide that SWF is essentially complete. Help out and pick up some money at the same time. Get the details at www.gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/competition.html. No one is keeping track of how many programmers have entered the contest, but anecdotal evidence such as e-mail indicates that a number of people have joined and are making contributions at all skill levels.

Other DotGNU News
Version 0.5.12 of Portable.NET has been released; this is the final release candidate before Portable.NET 0.6.0 is packed into the DotGNU 0.1 release CD. The planned release date for DotGNU 0.1 is October 10, and Portable.NET is ready. In addition to the ongoing SWF work, Portable.NET is concentrating on clean, well-documented installs for a wide selection of operating systems, including Windows and the Mac. CheapBytes also plans to sell the CD from their Web site.

As usual, the 0.5.12 release contains a wide range of improvements. Generics (a .NET version 2 feature) have been updated to better match the Rotor (Microsoft) implementation. Other enhancements include improvements in support for Mac OS X, along with PPC and ia64 processors, and improved internalization support with better HijriCalendar and Unicode handling, and new EBCIDIC, CJK, and Mac code. The usual big batch of small bug fixes, general cleanup, and signature corrections have also been made. One current challenge (probably solved by the time you read this) is getting all the image functionality to work through X11.

Both Mono and DotGNU have pages of screen shots that are being used as tests for the SWF controls being implemented by each group. To see the Portable.NET Project's pages, go to http://pnet.homelinux.org/screenShots.htm. The Mono Project's pages are at www.nullenvoid.com/mono/wiki/index.php/WineSamples. Each page in the list shows a number of copies of one control, such as a ListBox, with each copy having a different combination of properties, such as different background colors or different font formats.

One neat new addition to Portable.NET is a zip package with all of the Portable.NET source code and a Visual Studio solution to compile it all. The zip file is at http://pnet.homelinux.org/downloads.htm. Just download and unzip the file; load the .sln file from Visual Studio; and compile. Easy. One drawback is that this package will lag behind the work in cvs (version control), so once you get the .sln file, you will still need to do a checkout to get the latest code. A copy of this will be on the DotGNU 0.1 CD.

Mono
Mono has released an interim, Red Hat 9-only, version 0.27 as a favor to one of our commercial users, but will also shortly be releasing 0.28. The XSLT (XML style sheet) library is now completely in managed code, and is faster than the old C library. SWF and WineLib continue to improve, with support for the Windows common dialog boxes. To see these under Linux, go to the Mono home page, www.gomono.com, and scroll down to the September 16 news. In the same news item, check out Mono's ASP.NET hosting of Monodocs on both Apache and XSP.NET.

There is now a branch of the Mono compiler that includes generics (equivalent to C++ templates). By the time you read this, it may have matured enough to have been promoted to the main code line.

Someone has jumped in and done a lot of work on System.Drawing.Printing. We can now do printing, but all pages are stored as .jpg files, instead of actually being printed. I do not think getting the data to the actual printer will take much effort.

Odds and Ends
I do not have anything new to report on the Mono road map details, but I will get back to that in a future article.

The Gtk# programmers have a wiki at www.nullenvoid.com/gtksharp/wiki. Check it out, especially the software link that lists programs that use Gtk#, and the screen shots link showing the programs running (some on iPAQs).