MonoDevelop beta 3 is out

MonoDevelop beta 3 was released yesterday, with plenty of bug fixes and some nice improvements. This will hopefully be the last beta, everything should be ready for the final release by the end on January. MonoDevelop has now been branched for the release.

We did an important reorganization of the MD build structure. Add-ins which have uncommon dependencies, or which are still unstable have been moved to a new "extras" directory, and they will be distributed as separate packages. This makes the core MonoDevelop application easier to compile and install. The Boo and Gecko dependencies have been removed, and a new one has been added: Mono.Addins.

This is an important milestone for Mono.Addins, because for the first time we are distributing it as a separate package. Together with MD beta 3, I released Mono.Addins 0.3, which includes many fixes and some new features, such as support for add-in localization (see the release notes).

Mono Summit

It was awesome to meet all the Mono team again (some for the first time, since the team has grown a lot since last year), and also to have the chance to talk to many Mono users and contributors.

This time I gave two talks. The first one was a demonstration of MonoDevelop. It was a bit problematic because my laptop refused to show the video both in the LCD and the projector. The other laptop I had at hand with everything I needed for the demo was Ankit's, but it had the same problem. The solution we found just a few minutes before the demo was to run the demo in one laptop, and project it from the other laptop connected by VNC. Hacky, but it did the trick.

The other talk was about Mono.Addins. I did an overview of the library, explaining the basic concepts and common usage scenarios. This talk was also a bit problematic. Since the talk didn't include any demo, I just took the presentation and copied it to JB's laptop, who just had finished a talk about Cecil. I thought that a simple Impress presentation would work as expected in any laptop. I was wrong. I had spent several hours making some simple diagrams and animations in my OOo Impress presentation, which I think help a lot when explaining concepts. First of all, some text in the diagrams didn't show up. The cause for this was that JB's laptop had a dark GNOME theme, and Impress was painting white text over the white background of my presentation. Also, in the middle of the talk, Impress started freezing on some of the animations, and I had to stop several times the presentation because of that. I'm also wondering why Impress is so bad in drawing circles (in fact, curves in general). Despite all those problems, the presentation went ok and looks like people liked it.

Some MonoDevelop screencasts

The talks at the summit were not recorded, but I did some screencasts which more or less cover my demo. There are four of them: Creating a Simple User Interface, Creating Custom Widgets, Building Packages and Using Version Control.

Sorry for the low volume of the explanation (and for the bad english!), next time I'll try to do it better.

Holidays

I'm starting holidays tomorrow and I'll be back to work on January 7th. It doesn't mean I won't be online, answering mails or hacking. It means that I may just not.

Bon Nadal!