Paco's Blog

Gtk# 2.8.3 Runtime Installer -- Finally ;)

I am pleased to announce the completion of the latest release of the Gtk# Installer for .NET Framework Runtime.  You can see details of the release in its README.txt file.  The most important thing that users care about is that it offers Gtk# 2.8.3.  As a reminder, the Gtk# Runtime only includes those libraries needed for running and deploying Gtk# applications on Windows.

For the first time in over three years of Open Source community development and participation I have setup a page to facilitate the receipt of financial donations to help fund all of MFConsulting/Paco Martinez work on free of charge projects.  You can learn more about it on the donations page.

I should now return to work on the Mono Add-ins for Visual Studio to try to integrate Gendarme, MoMA and support for running projects on Mono hosted on a VMWare openSUSE session.

Merry Christmas to all and peace on Earth.

Gtk# Installer, Add-in and Help for Visual Studio

A new Gtk# Installer for .NET Framework SDK is out.  There are a few notable things that I want to highlight.  First of all, I went with GTK+ 2.8.20 and GNOME 2.14 for Windows.  The reason for these versions (over GTK+ 2.10 and GNOME 2.16) is that it better match what users of openSUSE 10.2 will find.  The selected versions have already gotten some testing by the users of Evolution for Windows.

The Gtk# version is 2.8.3 and some of the included Mono libraries come from Mono 1.2.1.  In case it has not been clarified before, my development cycle is:

1. Mono Combined Experimental Installer
2. Gtk# Installer for .NET Framework SDK
3. Gtk# Installer for .NET Framework Runtime

The order is important, since the creation of the first installer in the cycle provides the pieces necessary for the creation of the immediately subsequent one.

This release is the first to incorporate the add-ins for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the first take at an add-in for Visual Studio 2005.  Developers must keep in mind that you should first have at least one version of the Mono Combined Installer for Windows and/or my Mono Experimental Installer to use the add-in's "Run on Mono" functionality. Here is a little video on how to enable the add-in on VS2005.

The next thing that I want to announce is the creation of a Mono/Gtk# Help Collection for Visual Studio.  During the Mono Meeting I show the attendees a very early effort I had done to provide a Gtk# Help 2.0 collection set that could be use within Visual Studio. The feedback was very positive, so I went about expanding the included content as well as creating it in such way that it could actually provide context sensitive help when the user pulses the F1 key as the insertion point is resting on top of a Mono and or Gtk# specific code piece.

The installation of the Help collection is simple, and the same installer will prepare Visual Studio .NET 2003 and/or Visual Studio 2005 for its use.  However, the actual merging of the indexes and help text takes several minutes, so be patient.

I need people to kick the tires on these installers, so that I can move on to create a Gtk# Installer for .NET Runtime.

Some of the items I have pending on the Visual Studio Add-in and will get to as soon as I release the runtime installer are:

• Gendarme integration
• MoMA reporting
• InstallerMaker integration
• Launching project targets on Mono while hosted on openSUSE 10.2 VMware virtual machine

I want to thank the participants of the Mono Meeting 2006 for their interest and feedback.  I also take this opportunity to thank Daniel Morgan (danmorg), Andreia Gaita (shana), Jackson Harper (jackson), Chris Toshok (toshok), and Charlie Poole for their testing, patience and iterative recommendations.  However, none of this could be done without the generous donation of time and love of Monica and Maria (mis dos nenas).

Happy Birthday Paquito!
Today you would be 22.

Gtk# Installer Update

I had a fellow (its IP Address place him coming from China), that had relentlessly tried to get into my SSH ports at www.mfconsulting.com, ftp.mfconsulting and mail.mfconsulting. I made some changes but most important, I upgraded the OS of all my outward facing servers so that they are now either running SLES 10 or SUSE 10.1. Two of the boxes were running SUSE 9.2 and as we all know, the security patching for that version has been discontinued.

Unfortunately, all of those changes have really put a dent on my self imposed release schedule and that translates to about another 2 weeks before I release the new Gtk# Installers for .NET Framework. The good news is that once I am ready to release the SDK variant of the Gtk# Installers, it will for the first time, integrate the Mono Add-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and potentially the first pass at a Mono Add-in for Visual Studio 2005.

A byproduct of the upgrades is that I now have Sybase ASE Express 12.5 for linux running on SLES 10. I did not know if it would even be possible to do that, but thank God it is.

I will be going to military service for a fairly extended period -- Jan to May 07. While in service, I may have very infrequent access to the Internet and will likely be retracted from the Mono community. This is only temporary, and hopefully, will not impact anyone too severely.

I continue to rely more and more on Evolution as my personal information manager (PIM). Now that it can run on Win32, I wonder if it is time to begin playing with Evolution#. Can't wait to start but, will continue to work on the Gtk# Installers and the Mono Add-in until their release. In the mean time, I use monodocer to generate some evolution documentation. If you are interested in this, you can unpack the three files contained in this zipfile and place them in the sources directory of you MonoDoc installation. Restart MonoDoc, and you should find the new reference material under the Gnome node.