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January 2004 - Posts

Items of interest pt1

Head down busy coding lately so a quick summary of whats new

  • Joel has some great short Rotor JIT notes, will be great to see what Rotor info Joel posts.
  • Another Rotor staffer Michal has some posts on Rotor code annotations, would be great to see the Rotor code base covered in this manner as some sort of resource (book maybe?).
Sam Gentile makes MVP
Congrats to Sam for making MVP (C# MVP), indeed congrats to all the folk that have been awarded this.
Robert Hurlbut, Flex Wiki, Boston C# Users Group
My good buddy Robert has some great posts, one on setting up Flex Wiki and the other news on him speaking at the Boston C# Users Group. He really knows his stuff so if you are in the area I recommend you check it out.
New CLR blogger and other GCs for Rotor
Michael has some interesting info on his blog. Some news on GC releated projects for Rotor, the JMtk project I was aware of, would be interesting to see the research results from the other projects. Also welcome new CLR blogger, Yun Jin.
Xen bridging relational, hierachical data and the CLR

Micrososoft watch has an interesting article on a new Microsoft "programming language" codenamed Xen. Some confusion  in terms of implementation if this is a programming language, this site indicates its an extension to C# while this site states its

I am currently working on language and type-system support for bridging the worlds of object-oriented (CLR), relational (SQL), and hierarchical (XML) data

Its known that the X# work is going into the CLR so I suspect that Xen will be an extension of both the CLR and C#/VB.NET compilers (the CLR providing the services and IL op codes to make this work for other compilers). Would be nice to see the current state of thinking with this project, maybe on the Rotor code base?

Dare has some notes on a presentation on Xen, this paper is also worth a read.

Sam Gentile interview
Just in case you missed it, go and check out Sam sharing his thoughts on XP, COM Interop and the CLR. I enjoyed listening to his thoughts and any serious CLR coder should check it out. Of Sams thoughts on the CLR, I agree with "Its the runtime stupid" and the best single resource for learning the CLR is the code, Rotor. Some thoughts on Rotor and Mono, P.Net was not mentioned but like Mono its an open source CLR implementation.
New CLR Blogger, Rotor/SemiWorks and Mono

Welcome new CLR/Rotor blogger Michal Cierniak. His introduction post contains a referance to SemiWorks, curious as to what that may be a google search came up with this mail. Its both interesting and great news that Microsoft are running a project to integrate research into Rotor, what would be really great would be to see what the research is, papers etc (just a thought but sscli.net would be a great place for this).

On a related note Miguel has some news on Mono's First University Project with researchers working on the Regular Expression compiler, I am sure this work will be useful to Cesar.

Books for CLR coders pt2
Cesar asks what books are great for learning the CLR? In an earlier post I listed some of my fave CLR books, of that list its really down to what approach a programmer wants to take with the CLR as to which they buy (although I recommend that every CLR wonk buys them all). In Cesars case he wants to understand the CLR in depth, for this I recommend Essential .NET Volume 1, Appiled Microsoft .NET Framework Programming and Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standard.
New build tool
Miguel also has some info on a new build tool called MBuild, some of Mono hackers have been discussing why it's better than NAnt et al, not tried it my self nor have I seen anyone's thoughts on it, hopefully someone will blog it full detail.
Mono as a research tool

Miguel has interesting info on universities using Mono as research tool, he knows of a few examples of some universities choosing Mono as its JIT engine is more advanced than the one provided with Rotor. That said it has been said that Rotor may include the full JIT code (that is included in the commerical MS CLR) so things could balance out. Looks like Miguel has some hired hands to work on the JIT code, not ready yet but maybe next time ;-)

I do agree that Mono needs more documentation, the more that is done the more it will be used for research and development. Its important that such documentation (and indeed research results where possible) is made available to everyone that is interested in researching Mono from private persons to universities.

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