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 | #

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 | #

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 | #

I've just downloaded the sources for Mono 0.29 and compiled them. As expected, things went fairly well on my Linux box.

One of the great news is that the JIT for PPC is supposed to work now, so I decided to try to compile it on my iBook. After installing fink, and then installing glib2 and pkgconfig via apt-get (dselect still doesn't like me) ./configure went through - but then compilation failed.

Luckily the problem was easy to fix (you have to remove the typedef for socklen_t in mono/io-layer/socket.h) and after that things go on.

The <csc> task tests for Ant pass, but it is still not possible to build NAnt with it (bus error) - so PPC may work, but probably only for Linux.

path: /en/dotNet/mono | #

I managed to compile Mono 0.28 from sources on my Linux box and on my iBook. 0.26 wouldn't compile on my Mac as it failed to find a file necessary for the JIT (there is no working JIT for the PPC architecture, yet).

The first mini-test I do with a Mono installation is running Ant's tests. The tests for <csc> pass, which doesn't mean much more than that Mono's C# compiler is compatible enough to Microsoft's to at least pass the simplistic tests.

One small tweak to Ant's tests was necessary: I had to force Ant to use mint instead of mono as the runtime (i.e. no JIT) for my Mac as all the tests would have failed otherwise.

path: /en/dotNet/mono | #