Paco's Blog

I Wish I Had Gone to OSCON

There is this couple of guys down in Puerto Rico: Kevin and Pj. Too bad it can't be these three guys in Puerto Rico (couple of guys += paco).

Anyhow, they have been over at Oregon attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference.

Kevin makes these great blog entries. PJ Is so influencing the direction my Open Srouce development time is allocated (read my blog entries in the comments section for PJ's contributions).

But did not want to close this entry without mentioning the other very interesting event taking place in Nevada: Black Hat. Kyle's views of the event offer an interesting look coming from an Enterprise Programmer point of view. Dan Martin, another HEALTHvision co-worker who is over in Vegas as well, will tell me all about it when he gets back.

Passing the Torch

Well I am about to pass the Combined Installer work to the Novell champs. Someone in the Novell team may be involve on this. My work could not be in better hands.

Some interesting factoids:
Upload date for file mono-1.0-gtksharp-1.0-win32-0.4.exe:
Jul 21, 2004
Number of downloads as of Jul 29, 2004:
1,147

I have done more research on the Gtk# on the MS GAC deal, and have concluded that the combined installer SHOULD NOT install in the MS GAC.

I am however very optimistic that an installer that is exclusively dedicated for this purpose could be created and may ultimately achieve the Microsoft .NET Framework/Gtk# integrated development objective.

Before I have you visit me with your pitch forks and ropes in a lynching frenzy, take a look at this article. Jackson: I found all of the answers to the topics we were talking about the other day in IRC.

So now that brings me to the next junction in the road. Do I take a stab at building the Gtk# Installer for the MS NET Framework or, should I continue work on the Visual Studio Add-in for Mono?

I want your feedback.

I Will See You When I See You.... Take Care

Paquito and I just had our last electronic communication. He is now off to the middle east.

-- God bless you Son. I will see you when you get back.

Mono and the Windows Experience

I am going to get aggressive with the work needed to get Gtk# application development under Visual Studio .NET 2003. I am interested on this only because I know that step-debugging a la Visual Studio is just so useful.

I have achieved this already with the help of three or so unpublished batch files I wrote for the combined Mono Installer for Win32. I must admit that in the end I was having to set the local attribute to True for gtk-sharp library assemblies that my application was referencing to. This became necessary in order to have the full debugging experience work as it feels when doing a System.Windows.Forms application.

Now some of you may say that in such case I may have not really achieved the ideal behavior. What I say is that my aim is to afford development ease for Mono developers that live in Linux but visit Windows. It is also intended for those Windows Developers that want to have a guaranteed working application developed while using Windows but will ultimately be deployed to Linux.

Don't get me wrong, there are some fine people on the case already. The beauty of Open Source development in a community project is that it allows for parallel efforts to exist. In the end, good Internet citizens and community contributors will share notes and/or merge the product of their efforts for everyones benefit.

Some of you have seen my proposal for a prj2make-sharp Visual Studio .NET Add-in. This will be a companion adding to the Mono Combined Installer for Win32. I have also been thinking of Application templates like Gtk# application or Glade# Application that could display when you select new Solution/Project from the Visual Studio File/New/Project... menu.

For now, it is all about creating a renewable source of Windows 2000 Pro configurations. My weekend has been spent on playing with Drive Image 2002, Partition Magic 8 and MS Virtual PC 2004, on a Compaq Armada M700 notebook that has a 12 GB hard disk. This is to create disk images with combinations and variations of Win2k SP4, Visual Studio .NET 2003, MS .NET Framework 1.1 SDK, Cygwin, etc. Not a lot of fun.

I know that this sound cruel and unusual, but by the time you get this development system remember it was tested on a very humble and puny system so if it woks acceptable there, it will work very nicely on a real computer.

The Saint Windows Arch is the Gateway to Linux

The Mono, Gtk# and XSP Combined Windows Installer project is doing very well! I have used InstallShield for a long time, but my admiration for NSIS won me over. That is until I had to do some "real scripting" in NSIS. I now swear by Inno Setup. The dude that created Inno Setup used Borland's Delphi, so it is no surprise that Inno uses Pascal Script. How much Pascal Script does Paco knows? Apparently enough. :) All of the Pascal I took in college came rushing in to assist me. OK, so let me put the mandatory URL for the latest installer and the strongly suggested screen shots (for all these Monoers that will not give it a whirl unless they see pictures :-D)

Click on the desired picture to see the full size image.

Component Selection

The resulting Start Menu

Sample Windows Desktop with Mono Possibilities

Portuguese Restaurants are Best!

I went to our Waltham, MA office last week. We had a lot of intereststing and dare I say productive meetings on HEALTHvision related matters. I also took advantage of my close proximity to the Novell Cambridge office and sat down with Erik Dasque to go over the work I have been doing with the combined Mono Win32 installer. Originally, we had plan to go to a very fancy restaurant (ala New York steak house) but ended up going to a Portuguese restaurant called Casa Portugal in Cambridge street. The dinning was fantastic, the price was right, the company (Erik, Miguel, Duncan and Ben) was great and the conversation good.

Of Geeks and Pizza

I visited the Dallas DotNET User Group this past Thursday night. I was there from 5:30 PM (17:30) to 8:45 PM (20:45). It was interesting. This meeting was done at the Irving facilities of Microsoft. I got there fairly early and even saw some volunteers arranging the seats and tables for the meeting as well as the tons of Pizza being carted in by Papa John's. I had no Idea how many people where going to show up. The reason I was there in the first place was to see a presentation by a gentlemen called Scott Dockendorf.

A lot of people went... a lot. It was a friendly crowd that was very interested on the things being said and the people (a lot of Microsoft and Born employees) presenting and/or directing the event. Scott's presentation was very good but look like he had too much information for too little time. It may have been also better suited for folks who already do "Test Driven Development". I had a lady that seemed "technical" enough and 15 minutes into his presentation started asking me some questions about what he had just explained.

During the initial portion of Scott's delivery he called on me to share my experiences using TDD at HEALTHvision and as a Mono contributor. I must addmitt that it was a lot of fun to see all the Microsoft Consulting Services dudes faces when all the sudden they heard me being introduced as a Mono contributor. :)

Well, the installer has been out for a couple of days. I had a conversation with Miguel about the installer and he not only liked it, but even suggested a new idea for the Visual Studio Add-in.

I leave Monday for Boston for a couple of days.

Maria is still studying her C#, and Monica went yesterday to Six Flags at Arlington and her mother tells me that Monica had a great time.

It is Almost Here...

I am on the verge of completing a Windows installer routine for Mono 1.0, GTK# 1.0 and XSP 1.0. I deserve very little credit -- maybe not that little. This installer is built on the work of Gonzalo Paniagua, and Cory Aitchison (both Novell employees).

Once everyone has given me their feedback and the Head Honchos at Mono decide where should the installer reside at (Novell Forge, or Mono's Web site). I will publish the URL for the masses to enjoy.

Que Maravilla! or Wow! :)

Man what a great world we live in, and what great times!. Mono 1,0 has been released. Joseph Hill and I went for a quick coffee last night at Sandella's to talk about many things Mono. I hijacked the conversation a little bit to show him the Web Report Automation and Administration System (WRAAS).

Haha, If you knew of Paco back in the 1998 to 2001 you knew of the WRAAS. All the sudden the WRAAS went dormant for a lot of reasons -- I don't have enough hard drive space to tell you all about the WRAAS, MFConsulting, Kevin Shockey, Michael Chin, Rosa Marin, and/or Cellular ONE. For now just settle to know that an Open Source version of the WRAAS may begin soon (how soon? hmmm...)

Maria is Learning C# using a Charles Petzold book: Programming in the key of C#. Maria is the sexiest, kindest and one of the best loving mothers of all times -- Mimi aka Mami you are Awsome too ;-). She is so smart :-)

Some People have started leaving comments in my blog entries. All of them so far are incredible. I am so moved by the words and by the people who post them.

The SNAP has a new web site and blog!!!!!!

By the way PEdit can now be downloaded with a trial period that won't expire until 2008. I have noticed that when you give people free software with little or no strings attached they may use it.