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Here's a quick summary of interesting things from the past few months that I haven't blogged. Unfortunately I can't give each topic the time it deserves, but I think that's better than not mentioning them at all.

GHOP Results

The Google Highly Open Participation contest finished, and was a great success, with 40 completed tasks, a great improvement over my earlier post. Of particular note was the huge number of rules implemented for Gendarme. I'd like to thank all of our successful students and their mentors, and congratulations to Dan Abramov, our Grand Prize winner. I'd also like to single out Andreas Noever, another absolutely stellar student who very narrowly missed out on the top spot.

Novell Hack Week

During Novell Hack Week I worked on an automatic error reporting system that I intend to use in MonoDevelop at some point. I got rather hung up on collecting as much system and process information as I could, so it unfortunately wasn't completed.

However, I did have fun "architecting" a client/server/webserver data channel, which I planned to re-use for several other purposes: reporting problems' solutions back to the user, and collecting application usage data. Now that I've seen how useful such data can be, in Jensen Harris's awesome presentation on how the Microsoft Office ribbon was developed, I'm particularly interested in having something similar in MonoDevelop.

Game Developer's Conference

Towards the end of February some of us on the Mono team went to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to promote Mono as a game scripting engine, and find out what games developers need to make this work for them. All in all it was great fun, and very successful. Miguel has a longer writeup.

I would be interested to find out what we could do to make Mono more attractive for gaming, both for embedding as a scripting engine, and as a portable runtime, and how this could be supported by MonoDevelop. One of the real strengths of Mono is the development tools, and I would like MonoDevelop to become part of the gaming development ecosystem. One suggestion would be an "Axiom Studio" addin for MonoDevelop as an alternative to XNA.

MonoDevelop 1.0 Release

After years of development, we released MonoDevelop 1.0 alongside Mono 1.9, and work is already well underway on the next release. I'm already working on ASP.NET code completion, which is coming along quite nicely. I've also updated and integrated Matt Ward's XML Editor into MonoDevelop trunk.

Google Summer of Code

MonoDevelop is once again taking part in the Google Summer of Code under Mono's umbrella. I really enjoyed mentoring Marcos last year, and I'm looking forward to doing some mentoring this year.

Visit to the UK

These past couple of weeks I was in the UK visiting family and friends. it was nice to see people again after 5 months in another continent!

The Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest has been running for a couple of weeks now, and the Mono Project has seen a fair bit of action. Sadly we've only had five completed tasks, with a couple more almost done. On a lot of the claimed tasks, many of the students and mentors have been slow to act, busy with real life work. I think that the timescale of the tasks makes things difficult. It's not easy to think up a task that an inexperienced student can complete within five days, especially considering that they often need to get up to speed with the technologies before starting, and need to fit it in around schoolwork. Hopefully now that the Christmas holidays are beginning, students will have a lot more time to spend on the GHOP!

I apologise to any student who's been held up from starting further tasks because of delays in reviewing and closing the tasks. Doing a proper job takes quite a bit of time, and the Mono team has a lot of other important things to do too, like getting the shiny new Mono 1.2.6 and MonoDevelop 1.0 Beta 3 releases ready.

I'd like to put out a general request to everyone and anyone in the Mono community, or working with Mono-based apps, to lend a hand for the GHOP. You can submit proposals for tasks on the Mono GHOP issue tracker, and critique students' work. It doesn't matter if you can't write code — help with docs or icons. Go out and send students our way. This has the potential to be a huge community event. You can find us hanging out on #mono-ghop as well as the usual IRC channels on GIMPNet IRC.

So far, all five completed tasks for the Mono GHOP have been MonoDevelop -related. I'm really pleased with the amount of interest we've had so far. I'd like to thank our hard-working students and mentors, and the wonderful people at Google's Open-Source Program Office who put this contest together.

• Dan Abramov submitted a very cleanly-written addin to integrate the Smokey code analysis tool . I'll be using this to tidy up minor bugs in the MonoDevelop codebase, and hopefully we can ship it in the addin repository after the 1.0 release.
• This was followed by some fantastic icons from Vinicius Depizzol ("videpizzol"), and these will certainly be in the 1.0 release. They're not yet in SVN due to my pending review of our icon usage and handling in MonoDevelop.
• The completed Brazilian Portuguese translation by Renato Felipe Atilio ("renatoat") is now our most up-to-date first translation, though due to changes to our translation infrastructure it's not merged into SVN yet.
• The latest addition to our still-meagre documentation comes from "entereczek", a Tutorial for C/C++ Projects. I've put it on the MonoDevelop wiki.
• Although not strictly a MonoDevelop contribution, "dwashing" created a MonoDevelop solution for F-Spot that's been committed to SVN.

Please continue to suggest, claim and review tasks. We still have plenty left on the issue tracker over at Google Code.Pop over to #mono-ghop on GIMPNet IRC to discuss things or to hang out with us.