MJHutchinson.com Michael Hutchinson's Home on the Web

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!

Well, the Summer of Code is now ended. The ASP.NET MonoDevelop addin is now open to testing, and although it doesn't look any better than my previous screenshots, it's quite a bit more stable.

If you want to build the AspNetAddIn, just build MonoDevelop from SVN with the --enable-aspnet configure option. To enable the AspNetEdit Visual Designer you will need to build and install the jscall-sharp library (available from Mono SVN) and you will additionally need the MD configure option --enable-aspnetedit. The addin will probably be in the upcoming MonoDevelop 0.12 release, although it won't be built by default, so it may be worth waiting for that.

As well as testing, I welcome bugfixing and new features. If it's something big, please check with me first to make sure that someone else is not working on it already. I personally have a load of feature additions lined up for the future, but right now I need to spend a couple of weeks sorting a lot of stuff out, including this site, and sleeping :).

The Summer of Code has been fantastic. I've gained a lot of experience of working with a large and very well-designed codebase, which I think has improved my own coding a lot. I'd like to thank my mentor Lluis, who has been more than helpful with my many MD-related questions. Thanks also to Miguel and the rest of the Mono community for their help and support; this is a great community to work in, and I plan on sticking around.

And of course thanks to Google for running such a brilliant programme. Not only am I getting paid to do something I enjoy, but most of my favourite open-source projects (Mono, Gnome, GIMP, Inkscape, OGRE and Drupal, to name a few) have gained lots of exciting new features!

Update:
Here are some known issues with AspNetEdit:

1. To get some items in the toolbox, you'll need to add $PREFIX/lib/mono/2.0/System.Web.dll using the button on the toolbox toolbar.
2. On Firefox 1.5+ the control selection handles disappear after a few seconds. Mozilla 1.7 works fine.
3. The code from the design view can't be saved with older releases of Mono. This is caused by a bug in Mono's 2.0 classlib (or runtime) that has been fixed in SVN HEAD as of 11 Sept 2006.
4. The XUL/JS addin needs to be registered with your global Mozilla/Firefox profile. This happens when you install MonoDevelop, but if don't want to install the rest of Monodevelop (e.g. if you use 'make run') then you can just 'sudo make install' in the Extras/AspNetEdit/chrome directory.

I have been accepted into Google's Summer of Code 2006!

This time round I will be adding an ASP.NET Project type to MonoDevelop, with a proper compilation, preview and deployment workflow. I will then be able to host AspNetEdit in MonoDevelop as its graphical designer for ASP.NET.

I will be posting regular updates on my blog. Right now I'm trying to decide which of ASP.NET's compilations models to support, and how they can integrate with the project model. I'm also familiarising myself with MonoDevelop's extension model.

Apologies for the delay in this announcement, but I only finished exams last Thursday.

Well, it's exam time again. Five in total; first one on Monday, and the last is two days after I find out whether I've been accepted for the Summer of Code 2006. Not enjoying revision, and these exams – third year – are very important.

As for the Summer of Code, I've applied to work on ASP.NET Project Support for MonoDevelop. If I get accepted, I will be integrating AspNetEdit into a proper development environment at last!

My website can now be accessed at the domain http://mjhutchinson.com, and this redirects to the current site for now. I'll be migrating over after exams.

Hello everyone! (waves to as-yet nonexistent audience)

I finally bring to you some useful content in my blog. I have been accepted onto Google's Summer of Code and will be working with the Mono Project to bring you a user-friendly graphical designer for ASP.NET, which will be integrated into the MonoDevelop IDE.

I will be chronicling any interesting developments right here for your amusement and gratification. Stay tuned!

My name is Michael Hutchinson and I'm a Software Engineer working for Novell on the Mono Project.

This site is intended as a general place for me to post things that I feel may possibly be interesting to other people. There isn't much here yet, but I plan to develop it over the coming years.

Among my many computer and technology interests are

• software development and productivity tools
• the .NET framework and C# programming language