knocte :: MonoTema

(Zoot Woman - Lonely By Your Syde)

During the last months I've kept working {with|on} Mono, but not working for Novell anymore.

Today I'm proud to blog about a bit of work I've done on Mono towards a better Binary Serialization experience:

• mono-api-info command now can output ABI instead of API if you append the flag --abi. It has been useful for us in LindenLab while working on binary serialization compatibility between versions (already upstream!, so will be available in Mono v2.8, even with a new man page).
  
  If you ever wondered why your .NET code is no longer capable of deserializing some old binary object you had in your servers, instead of fixing the problem in a case-by-case basis, you can now see the whole picture by just diffing the output of mono-api-info --abi from your current and old codebase! A small TODO that I haven't completed yet is to deal with automatic properties (because we still don't use them) so that would be an exercise for the reader!


• Fix for upstream Mono to act as .NET in regards to Version Tolerant Serialization, a patch to which I have just added a lot more unit tests (soon to be pushed hopefully).
  
  You can see the patch of this quite old mono bug here. Disclaimer: to be honest you will only need the previous --abi tool if you use a Mono version prior this fix, because from my testing VTS in MS.NET works as if every new field had an [OptionalField] attached! (At least the BinaryFormatter, the TODO here for the reader is to test the SoapFormatter ;) )

On a totally unrelated note: kudos to the MonoDevelop team for making such a great releases lately (and fixing the bugs I report so promptly). I've been testing it the last months on Windows and I can say it's a great experience to see your favorite IDE working cross-platform and making you not depend on VS anymore if you need to work on Windows from time to time (I know the Express versions are free, and are great! but they do not support plugins :( ). BTW, I've been lately experimenting with the C language support in this IDE, and have had some problems, but the real culprit seems to lay behind some wierd behaviour of my gdb in opensuse. Taking advantage that I'm in opensuse planet, can I do a couple of lazyweb requests?:

a) If you're quite familiar with gdb, can you take a look at these 2 bugs in case it rings any bell for you? BNC#588175, BNC#459274

b) Can you try to reproduce those bugs in openSUSE 11.3? (I haven't migrated yet from 11.2 because I fear about the HALlessness of it :) )

PS: Wondered why the video on the top? Well, I like the trend that some people have about posting random photos in their blog posts even when they may be completely unrelated, but in my case I love music so I figured this would suit better. Of course I would rather embed a WebM video or, even better, something that can preview a song (without video) in a "normally-lower-quality-than-what-you-can-buy" way, so if you have any hints, those are welcome! I especially mention the latter in this case because the Album version of the song above is much much better (synth pop FTW!).

UPDATE 28-AUG-2012: Found a video-less alternative to youtube for embedding songs! It is GoEar.

Labels: CSharp, General, Ingenieria, Mono, Programacion, SoftwareLibre