Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days

For those of you that want to know what we're all about, it's like this ya'll: this is 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain and 100% reason to remember the name...
  -- Fort Minor

Miguel de Icaza, Chris Toshok, Jackson Harper, Sebastien Pouliot, Everaldo Canuto, Rolf Bjarne Kvinge, Atsushi Enomoto, myself and a few other guys from the kick-ass Mono Team, here at Novell, managed to do the impossible: Implement Silverlight in just 21 days.

3 Weeks ago, Miguel sent out a Call-To-Arms email to our internal Mono Team mailing list explaining that he'd been invited to participate in Microsoft's conference in France where he'd he able to demo whatever he had accomplished as far as reimplementing a version of Silverlight for Linux. I would say that within minutes of the team reading that call to arms, I and a bunch of others replied, volunteering for the mission...

I think I speak for all of us when I say that it was a blast working on this project. I know that, for myself, even after heading home from work at around 8 or 9pm every night, I'd walk in the door, grab a quick bite to eat and immediately sit down in front of my computer and begin hacking on it again and I'd almost always find at least Jackson and Toshok on IRC hacking on it too.

I haven't been this enthusiastic about hacking in a long time (and that says a lot seeing as how I said the same thing just a few months ago when I joined the Mono Team to work on MonoDevelop). Even now, I've got ideas I want to experiment with to improve Moonlight even further. I'll probably get back to hacking on it (even though the 21 day hackathon is over) as soon as I finish posting this.

To all the people out there that congratulated us in response to reading Miguel's blog, thanks - we appreciate it. It feels good to both have accomplished something this amazing and be cheered at the same time :-)

To those of you who think this is a waste of time because similar things exist, I have this to say:

nothing ventured = nothing gained.

We, as the Free Software Community, wouldn't have all the great and wonderful things that we have today if the developers didn't "waste their time implementing alternatives." I urge you to take a moment to reflect on that.

If, after that reflection, you still wish to resist change: no one is forcing you to use Mono - you're free to remain in the stone age, living in a cave, trying to write software by scraping coal along the cave walls ;-)

That said, Rock On fellow Mono lovers!

Pirates Knocked Up Shrek

Great day today

I know a movie star
I’ve got her plastered to my wall.
Just like we’re dear old friends
Like she already knows me.
She’s as perfect as she seems,
Lifts me right out the mezzanine.
I finally fell in love,
I’d been waiting forever.

   -- Guster

I'm an Uncle!

My little sister had her baby boy (Alexander) last night.

Implement Interface

MonoDevelop Refactory work update:

This past week, after getting Renaming working for method parameters, I added context menu items that could implement a target interface's properties, methods, and events implicitly or explicitly auto-magically for the programmer.

You can see screenshots of these menus in an older post of mine, Refactory Operations

Godspeed, Robert Love

Today was Robert Love's last day at Novell, Inc.

Take care, Mr. Architect! Hopefully we'll continue to run into each other from time to time.

MonoDevelop Refactoring

Have you ever wanted to rename a variable in a source file and have all of the references to that variable be renamed as well? I'm sure you have. If you are a typical Linux developer, the only option you've ever had available to you would be to perform a Search & Replace action in your editor (bound to Alt-% in my Emacs editor).

...But this solution is hardly perfect. Search & Replace might match substrings you wouldn't want to replace, so you'd have to examine each substring match manually to accept the change, but this is prone to mistakes. Using a regex Search & Replace might help minimize mistakes in that you might be able to eliminate substring matches that were part of other identifiers, but you'd still have to manually examine each change if you re-used variable names in different scopes or different functions/methods within the same file.

...Which brings us to the next problem: editors historically used by programmers on Linux have never offered to update source files that depend on the current buffer, so programmers would have to manually update the other source files as well.

Welcome... to the Future.

This past week I've been working on a feature allowing MonoDevelop users to rename local variables, classes, interfaces, class members, methods, events, properties, etc and have all the appropriate code in the entire project auto-magically updated, no matter where you invoke the rename action (whether it be in the base class, inner class, some other section of code that uses the class, etc).

Just another example of Mono bringing improvements to Linux developers everywhere.