September 13, 2004

The Add-in Lives

I have been somewhat silent while building the Visual Studio Add-in that complements the Mono Combined installer.

On top of that, my day job has kept me busier that ever. They are finally starting to venture into Linux whith a few boxes -- even though it is for trials. The cool thing is that it is not being done by development anymore, but rather by some of the Operations guys. They are doing both Fedora Core 2 and SuSe 9.1.

I visited the Plano Dot Net Users Group to talk with Joseph Hill. As a great bonus, I managed to meet Jason Alexander, the author of the very cool nGallery.

I have now ventured a couple of times into the Dallas/Fort Worth .NET Geek communes. This has left me wanting to share Mono and Gtk# with all of these neighbors. So I have decided to begin work on a CD that can be handed in these kind of events.

The way I see it, one could put all of the Mono/Gtk# related Win32 installers (Mono Combined Installer, Gtk# Win32 Installer for .NET Framework SDK, the Gtk# Library Reference for Visual Studio and the VSPrj2Make Visual Studio .NET Add-in). We could make it have a nice little autostart menu so that when the CD is inserted it gives you this overview and launching pad to install all the pieces in the right order. But what will be really neat is to include some prerecorded demos/tutorials of the installations, use of the wizards, templates and basic know how of Gtk# app development in Win32.

We may put together a couple of seminars on how to configure and program with Mono, XSP and MonoDevelop for Win32 programmers and users. Yes, that means coverage for such things as Webmin, Samba and Red-Carpet installation and use for our fellow MS jockeys :)

I may look for corporate sponsorship, but at this point I would like to know if there would be interest in such a thing. So, write me an email or something to help me figure out if I spend more time in Windows or if I should go back to SuSe/Novell and the cool world of non-Microsoft based computing.

If you are interested, here is a 11 MB AVI file that shows some promise as to the videos I have been hinting of.

This one has audio and is smaller (under 6 MB) but it requires Windows Media Player -- I will try to convert these to more open and supported standards.

http://ftp.novell.com/pub/forge/gtks-inst4win/docs/GtkSh-inst.wmv

Posted by martinf at September 13, 2004 05:39 AM
Comments

As always, great work!

The combined installer and the plug are really essentials for opening up mono for any MS developer, and as a result, like I've posted before, I think your work is very important. That said, I am not convinced that producing materials like what you are talking about is the most important *next* step.

As proper installation and materials now are becoming available (as a result of your work) I think that any MS developer could easily start targeting mono. So, I think that the next thing is not so much easing the "migration" path further, but perhaps providing incentive (a "why" and "what") and demos/starting points, along the lines of and in complement to projects at gotmono.

On a sidenote: I am not that fascinated by gtk, am more interested in deploying .NET server apps on linux (debian, but that seems to be going pretty sloooow as usual with debian) via mono.

/mawi

Posted by: mawi at September 13, 2004 01:02 PM

Hey Paco! It was a pleasure meeting you as well! Definitely keep in mind that if there's anything we can do at the Plano .NET Users Group with handing out fliers, doing talks, etc... just let me know!

Take care,
-Jason

Posted by: Jason Alexander at September 13, 2004 02:09 PM

Marvellous work! I haven't gotten the time to look into this yet, but it looks great. The only nit I have is that the Glade icon seen in Visual Studio.NET kind of blends out and looks a bit ugly compared to the other VS.NET icons. ;-)

Posted by: Asbjørn Ulsberg at September 14, 2004 12:43 AM

Trying to install vsprj2make, the "README for vspr2make ver 0.95.1.0" (naming bug: vsprj2make vspr2make) lists "mono-1.0.1-gtksharp-1.0.89-win32-0.6c.exe" as a requirement. I could not find this version, the actual version seems to be 0.6b. So I assume there is another naming bug here.

What confuses me more, though, is to find all relevant pieces to start programming in Mono/Gtk# using Microsoft Visual Studio.

For a novice like me this is a frustating experience - I already spent a whole day and still have no IDE up and running for Mono/Gtk#. I am even not sure not to have missed some important information.

Therefore I would love to see a combined installer, setting up and configuring a complete programming environment for Microsoft Visual Studio users and/or SharpDevelop users.

Nevertheless, thank you for your important work so far!

Posted by: Christoph Kreß at September 18, 2004 07:06 AM

Hey Paco.

I just have to say, this Mono/Gtk#/VS.Net-Addin CD sounds a lot like SNAP! :-D

Later, dude!

Posted by: PJ Cabrera at September 20, 2004 12:22 PM