I'm quite busy at work ATM but still managed to give the latest Mono release a try on both Linux and MacOS.
As usual things worked absolutely fine on Linux but I had some build problems on my iBook. make install fails with
Unhandled Exception: System.ExecutionEngineException: SIGILL in (unmanaged) (wrapper managed-to-native) Mono.Tools.Driver:symlink (string,string) in <0x00088> (wrapper managed-to-native) Mono.Tools.Driver:symlink (string,string) in <0x00b04> Mono.Tools.Driver:InstallAssembly (string[]) in <0x007f4> Mono.Tools.Driver:Run (string[]) in <0x0005c> Mono.Tools.Driver:Main (string[])
The resulting partial installation is usable enough for my little Ant tasklib and for the first time ever I successfully ran NAnt's <echo> task on a Mac. Time to give something serious a try, when I find time.
I'm really impressed how far Mono for PPC and in particular for OS X has come since I first tried it (0.28, about seven months ago).
path: /en/dotNet/mono | #
I just had a look at WiX, a toolset to generate Windows installer packages from an XML description.
After the hype about Microsoft making an internal project available as Open Source Software is calming down again, I wondered what one could do with it. Building installers is certainly part of many build processes, so an Ant task sounds reasonable. I downloaded the source and there is some part written in C++ but for most of it it looks as if I should be able to run the binary on Mono. I'll give this a try.
Loren Halvorsen's Blog shows how to use WiX from NAnt. The example could be literally translated to Ant, but a <wix> task could do better - at least it could pipeline compiler and linker into a single step and it could sit on top of my .NET task library experiment so that it transparently runs on Mono or Microsoft's CLR.
Unfortunately all the documentation I could find is inside a chm file - does anybody know of a viewer for this that runs under Linux or MacOS X?
path: /en/dotNet/wix | #
Mono installation fest today. I installed Mono 0.31 on Linux as well as my iBook running MacOS X. My usual test is building NAnt and running the test suite of Ant's .NET tasks. As always things went smooth on Linux.
I didn't have any compilation trouble on OS X this time, but the JIT is still rather wacky. Whenever I try to build NAnt, I get greeted by a core dump or mono hangs - this time it hangs after an unhandled NullReferenceException (could be NAnt's fault).
So I tried Ant's .NET task tests and for the first time ever, mono - the JIT - worked for a simplistic "Hello world" like example. I'm happy.
It looks as if the .NET antlib is in a usable state right now and I consider putting together some kind of official release so it gets a bit more testing. I may even use it to push for an Ant subproject dedicated to Ant task libraries.
path: /en/dotNet/mono | #
John Lam has a nice doc about MSBuild, Microsoft's XML based build system of the next Visual Studio version. This issue has far more information than has publicly been available yet.
You may need a Windows machine running Acrobat Reader to read it as both xpdf on Linux and preview on MacOS X seem to be lacking the fonts necessary for it.
path: /en/dotNet/msbuild | #
Miguel de Icaza says
The MacOS X port is working, but it needs testers on MacOS to try the latest editions of the Boehm GC do build fixes and so on.
I'll have to try it out since it still seems very likely that .NET will become a more important part of my day job and I really don't want to switch to an Intel based notebook.
Last night's Mono snapshot fails in configure with a syntax error
checking for pkg-config... /sw/bin/pkg-config ./configure: line 20032: syntax error near unexpected token `BASE_DEPENDENCIES,' ./configure: line 20032: `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(BASE_DEPENDENCIES, glib-2.0 >= $GLIB_REQUIRED_VERSION)'that I don't have the time to diagnose right now. My previous attempts with released versions failed to produce a usable binary so far.
path: /en/dotNet/mono | #