A great thing has happen. I will be visiting Puerto Rico for the first time in almost five years! Mi beautiful wife Maria and my little angel Monica are already there on vacation. I have been invited to participate on the Puerto Rico Open Source Congress as a presenter on my favorite subject Mono! I take this opportunity to thank Erik Dasque, Todd Berman, Miguel de Icaza, Kevin Shockey and Kyle Davis for making this great opportunity possible.
Speaking of Mono, the Beta 1 release has everyone running like crazy to put the finishing touches. There are many parts to Mono but the one I have grown most attached to is MonoDevelop. The community’s IDE for Mono is about to go out as release 0.3 and it will add a lot of features that make it much more inter operable with other .NET IDEs and better capabilities to facilitate the build process of one’s project.
I have been so busy that I had to wait until now to make an entry. It is sort of pathetic that on something like blogs that are supposed to let you author content from pretty much anywhere in an easy fashion, an yet I don’t do it often enough.
Went to the theater to watch the movie "Man on Fire". Not a bad movie but perhaps a good one to confirm my theory that Miguel de Icaza looks like Marc Anthony or the other way around. The cool thing is that even if one does not see the similarity, I think it can still be said that both are great latinos.
Well, I am now 40 years old. Had two great birthday celebrations yesterday. At the office they decorated my cube in a way reminiscent of "Fiestas Patronales". At home, Maria and Monica decorated the dinning room and the living room in very special way. My son Paquito, called me from Korea, and we talked for over an hour. My mother and my good friend Matt Gutierrez also called to say "Felizidades".
I am so very occupied between Mono, HEALTHvision and a potential consulting engagement that MFConsulting may have with one of Fort Worth?s biggest private employer.
My friend Kevin Shockey who has been very busy himself with the SNAP project became a father for the third time!
Erik Dasque has invited me to write a tutorial intended to help Windows programmers work with their MS .NET Framework created projects in the Linux platform using Mono (and maybe prj2make#).
I had offered my friend Todd Berman to create a MonoDevelop addin that imports *.sln and *.csproj into the corresponding *.cmbx and *.prjx files.
I am a tad busy right now, but once my girls leave for a month in the paradise island of Puerto Rico, I should have time to please all the requests and pledges in my queue.
Well, I just finished updating prj2make-sharp so that it can generate makefiles using MonoDevelop workspace (*.cmbx) and project (*.prjx) file formats.
I used the .NET Framework capability for deserializing XML documents into an object graph ? see my previous blog entry for more details.
One of the byproducts of this effort is a set of documents that maps out the structure of both combines and project files. I used XMLSpy 4.0 Professional from Altova to generate these documents from the xsd files prj2make includes in its source code. I think XML Spy is very good and very expensive. Hint: At over $500, XML Spy wold make a great Open Source Linux GTK# project ? God knows I rather give my fellow community members a shot at my millions :)
Next stop for prj2make:
Generation of MonoDevelop project files from Visual Studio .NET csproj files
Rumor has it that maybe portions or all of prj2make could be included in Mono 1.0. I will become 40 years old on April 22, and what I want most for my birthday is to be allowed to put one of those awesome Mono Contributor png's somewhere in my website.
I want the cease of hostilities in the Middle East and for my son to come back from his never ending tour of duty in Korea, but the Mono emblem is quite high up there.
I am currently working on a project that sort of woks like an Interface engine for things like HL7, X12N and NCPDP Script messages. We recently bought a very fine and expensive Interface engine at work. However, we have been using a very simple "managed" solution written completely in C# -- if it woks, I wrote it, else :).
Now, we have this guy who is really good at "product" management and on top of that, he takes "specs" that are published in pdf files and creates all these great mapping guides for what "our" implementation of the HL7 or X12 is going to be. Better yet, he takes xmlspy and generates some pretty nifty xsd files from were he later derives great HTML based documented diagrams, It makes my life very easy.
I then take the xsd files and generate classes using xsd.exe. Now my interface engine takes these XML representation of HL7, X12, etc. and I can easily parse it and populate database tables as appropriate. The technique I am using is pretty much inspired by XML serialization/deserialization. This process then throws XML validation exceptions if things don't work as planed, and I get to wok with code that looks and feels a whole lot more like an object graph and OO programming than the typical MS XML DOM manipulation of last year and the years before.
I have grown to like it so much that now I think that all the problems of the world (hunger, plagues, politics, terrorism and poverty) can be solved by doing some xsd.exe and C#.
Next stop:
Generation of Makefiles from MonoDevelop combines and project files using xsd/C#.
NOTE: Todd, now you know why I asked you this morning :)
I am trying to decide how do I go about packaging binaries for prj2make. It will be easy for Windows, not so sure for Linux.
At the office...
Quovadx, Data Exchange, HEALTHvision, I just want us to get along.
Here is another of my email rants in the Mono-list mailing list. Not to be narcissistic, but it may have some value for new Windows developers that are trying to get started in Linux/Mono.
