xaml designer for monodevelop

Long time, I have not blog… So I will pop up some news!

First, I have worked on monoTorrent to fix some bug on DHT, clean code, support for nodes segment in torrent file and use it. This last part is not on svn yet but will be soon. (Alan is reviewing it) Go Alan go! 0.80 of monoTorrent will follow soon after that and I hope that 1.0 will not been so far .

The second point is a xaml designer plugin for MonoDevelop. I am working on it for 1 month.
You can found it here:
I have start by converting the lunar eclipse to use the  MoonlightHost GTK widget which replace the old GtkSilver.

I add a zoom system to zoom with wheel from the mouse cursor position. But, I am not happy of it because it is a drawing system in canvas but I miss a designer mode to add controls on container and all things like stetic done on MonoDevelop.

So, I have start to write a glu between lunar eclipse system and MonoDevelop view part. Now, I start to work on the designer part to drag and drop item from toolbox on the xaml designer.

I am far from the end and it is still very buggy but here are some screenshots!

First, you see the new button designer when you work on xaml file!

Here the code is loaded in the designer and now we get that :

Now, you see that I have adapt the code from stetic gtk designer to have this beautiful combo-box with the tree of the xaml document:

Now, you have 2 modes:

• one for drawing with toolbox as gimp :

• and the 2cd one for designer with all control that you can drag and drop!

The drag and drop is still not working and if people understanding the gtk system can help me on that, I will be happy

theora decoder

Since MonoTorrent is quite features complete. I look for new challenge

So I have start to work on dirac but I skip it quickly because we have first to work on a more flexible system in for media stream source in moonlight.

I have start to code something where I get out of ogg media stream source the vorbis code and try to make ogg accept other codec as dirac or theora.

I come to conclusion that before done glue I need to have more codec to see all the needs of differents codecs. So I start to code a theora decoder from specification of xiph.

If you want to help, I code on my own branch here:

http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewvc/branches/cscodec/

Anyway, it is just a start so do not expect to read a single video, it need a lot of work to achieve it!

udp tracker and distributed search

WOW, long time I have not blog about my life…. (2 years)

But today, I want to talk because a lot of great things append:

• First, I have complete this week the udp tracker code for monotorrent library.  The goal is to reduce overhead. I know that UDP is an ugly protocol (No IPv6 support, no field to represent the user agent,…)
• I have compose an idea of a distributed search engine, I will send it to bittorrent.org but I need feedback before sending it. This mean that with meta-data exchange support and DHT, we can be fully tracker less.

This mean that we are close features  full. We will not code the azureus support because utorrent extension have the same features. I hope Alan will release the 1.0 soon.  Monotorrent have a new website with a wiki with all you need to know to use monotorrent library. We still need to improove some documentation, so fill free to edit/add page in wiki…

Monotorrent.com is still an 404 error but we have the site.

Alan have done a beautiful work with this library and I have help him a bit on few part and I am really happy of it.

Alan have refactored a lot of module to make it very flexible, so do not just think to bittorrent client GUI (as monsoon). This library can be used in many other ways. In fact every time you need to spread data, you can think to it. Direct download is quick when you have only few downloader but when you need to spread a lot of data bittorrent is the best. So it can be used to spread patch among a a lot of client as done on World of Warcraft.  And do not forget that this can be used cross-plateform.

Just for fun, here is the list of current features in MonoTorrent library:

• Encryption
• Dht
• Peer Exchange (uTorrent style)
• Local Peer Discovery
• Web Seeding (getright style)
• Magnet Links / Metadata download
• IPV6
• FAST Extensions
• Sparse files (NTFS file system)
• Multi-tracker torrents
• Compact tracker responses
• IP Address white listing / black listing
• Fast Resume
• Initial Seeding (super seeding)
• Selective downloading
• Prioritised downloading
• Full bittorrent tracker
• Dynamic request queue size
• Memory Cache
• Endgame mode
• Per torrent and global rate limiting
• Individual file relocation

monotorrent api is great !

Monotorrent is really great thanks to the beautiful work of Alan.
I have read the code and it is really easy to understand.

Thanks to this beautiful Api it was very easy to add a lot of features to the core api.

So here is what I have added during the last month (with the help of Alan):

• super-seeding (also known as the initial seeding) it permit to be faster when you have made a torrent and start to broadcast it on net…In this mode the rules to choose where I send piece are different
• uTorrent peer exchange: exchange with the swarm the peers.
• web seeding (getright specification only) This specification allow to download on web site with HTTP and FTP and do not need any script on server side (just a regular link). This specification contain a bonus which is just a nice to have : gap management but I have not implemented it. There is just some basic code on my branch in piece picker class.
• libtorrent metadata support: you can receive the other metadata contain in the torrent file from other peer with this message. this features allow monotorrent to be tracker less. You just download the infohash with a magnetlink and get from other peers the torrent file.

I have code some other things which are not on trunk :

• magnet link: this features is like the edonkey link. It is link to the libtorrent metadata features.
• a basic work for gap management in piece picking process (getright specification)
• Event and function to have chat message usable in lib. This will evolve to support Azureus chat message protocol
• azureus protocol: I have just started it and it is far from compilable but will be soon I need to do the negotiation protocol too!

In the big next TODO there are

• the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) which allow to be fully trackerless.
• make the winform gui look like gtk GUI
• rss fully supported in winform gui
• search engine
• partial seed
• Location-aware protocol

Here you have a list of extension in protocol:

http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#Reserved_Bytes (technical view)
http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html#draft-beps (official draft)

A managed OS

We have ever heard about singularity the Microsoft project to make an OS in managed language. Most is done in managed mode but some part are done in asm.

And now, we have 2 projects in open source which try to make it all in manged way SharpOS and Cosmos…

Both project have succeed to boot with virtual machine.

Cosmos have made a compiler which convert the IL(intermediate language) code in assembler code. So code is compile just in time but ahead of time. (The mono compiler can ever done it). I do not know if there are differences between mono AOT and Cosmos one…

SharpOS use another way. They build a PE file with MultiBoot header.

SharpOS have a great documentation to explain how it work, especially on boot time.

If you want to learned how work an OS there is another good project named SOS for Simple OS (fork from KOS) which is lead by a French Linux magazine. This is in C/C++ but you have a lot of documentation which come from articles in the magazine freely available. All article are in french but it can help if you want to help SharpOS or Cosmos and know nothing about kernel.

html5 working draft published!

Since 1999, there is no new features in HTML language.

The language is really poor and have not evolved with the needs of user. To fix that, we can use javascript to manipulate the DOM but it is take a lot of lines of code to do small things. We have AJAX to have better performance by not refresh the whole page.

And we have Flash, Silverlight, Moonlight, XUL,… which are basically plug-in over your browser to add a lot of cool things to your browser.

And a lot of people talked about who will win … but we have forget the HTML standard which have not evolved during a long time. The working draft of HTML 5 seems very promising.

This is a working draft, so all can evolved but we can see what they want to do…

To sum up they add a lot of missing things witch is done with AJAX, javascript, …

So, I will try to sum up what we will have in this HTML5:

• Document structure: section, header, footer, article, aside will be useful to cut your document in area
• Multimedia flag: video, audio will replace the object flag and will be more easier to use and canvas will allow dynamic drawing (ever in Firefox 2)
• forms: the specification of WHATWG show what will be done here. But nothing is currently in the working draft. But we can hope new input attributs: calendar, timepicker, email, … and repeater to avoid to have a list same flags…
• new controls: Datagrid to make tabular or hierarchical set of rows of elements. progress and meter will be cool to show to user that he have to wait. it is better than a GIF or an Ajax progress bar. And we have some other things as command and menu
• area post: it will replace Ajax for a lot of things… here we have datatemplate, rule and nest flag to manage the template dynamically. I have not understand all here but sounds promising….
• storing data in database: but in local and this will be persistant during the session.
• catch drag&drop without javascirpt

This draft will evolved maybe in good maybe in bad way but hope standard will bring a lot of missing things. I do not think we will have all features of flash/silverlight in HTML5 but we will get a lot of cool new things. We will still be far from rich browser plugin but we get lot of cool new things in standard…

libxml2.so issue with mono 1.2.6

If you have an issue on ubuntu to build monodevelop 0.18 because of an error with the libxml2.so, I have found a solution.

The error talked about gzopen64 which is not found. So I looked for it in google and find this bug report:

In fact, the bug come from a bad link with libz to check it just do

whereis libxml2 //to get where it is install.

For me it is in /usr/lib, so I do

ldd /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2

This give me this result:

linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7e2c000)
libz.so.1 => /home/myuser/mono/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7e17000) // this is the install folder of mono 1.2.6
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xb7df2000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7ca8000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0×80000000)

As you can see, the libz.so.1 is linked to my binary install of mono 1.2.6.

So when I check it, I see that this is a link file to libz.so.1.2.1 in the same folder.
So, I check my previous version of this lib
whereis libz

/usr/lib/libz.so.1

This file is a linked to libz.so.1.2.3.3.

Haha! Here we are, the version of ubuntu gutsy is 1.2.3.3 and the version of mono is 1.2.1.1. So I just change the link to point to the 1.2.3.3 lib. To do that you have a lot of solution.

You can copy/paste the file from /usr/lib to your mono/lib or and just change the link file libz.so.1 to link to the libz.so.1.2.3.3. (Or you can do the trick with ldconfig as said on the bug report.)

And now monodevelop build! You can enjoy all the new features

rem: The other big issue I face of is boo build because it use nant and I do not found how to install deploy it as “make install”(copy assembly in gac and make pc file). So I use gacutil to install all dll but I miss the pc file ( package config). So, I have copy the old boo.pc from /usr/lib/pkg-config/ and change version and path to get the good boo install from my new mono 1.2.6 installation folder.

I hope this can help other people who try to have monodevelop 0.18 on ubuntu!

Merry Christmas!

ubuntu 7.10 released!

This is not official but will be in few hours now official…

Ubuntu released the 7.10.

My wife want to test linux. So I will install ubuntu on her PC to compare my suse with ubuntu

user friendly installer

Since I have switch to linux, I have found a lot of things very useful and really better than windows on linux.

The only thing which stuck me everytime is looking for package, find it, and install it.

The idea of a centric application sharing server is great but why show to final user all library when he only search front a front end for example.

The search & install system is really slow because it will looking for package in all repository.

For example, I have looked a video viewer (Video lan ) and I have found all package about video ( gstream lib, …) whereas I only search a front end.

For me, yast must have a basic and an advance mode.

The basic mode will show you only front end with name,description and a small screenshot. Best is too show it by category and allow user to filter with a textbox. And when you install Yast select all needed missing dependencies.

And if you are looking for a library, you will have to switch to advanced mode where you have a lot of more technical information.

This system will be far user friendly than search in thousand answer to video player…

EDIT: gnome-app-install seems to answer to my need. But it is on ubuntu (apt) whereas I am on opensuse (rpm). I will search if there is a solution for suse else I will try ubuntu. I know that suse is better for configuration with yast but ubuntu   is far better for package management.

ironruby under mono

Today, I have made a patch to fix the rakefile of Microsoft team of IronRuby.

This patch allow ironruby to be compiled with mono with the basic rakefile.

You just have to use mono flag : “rake compile mono=1″.

You can found it on ironruby mailing list.