[Opensim-dev] new Mono

[Hurliman, John]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de [mailto:opensim-dev- 
> bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of Stefan Andersson
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 12:54 AM
> To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] new Mono
> 
>> IIRC, Mono 1.2.6 supports a limited amount of .NET 3.0 syntax. Mono
> 1.9.1 was the first version to have a complete implementation of the 
> language changes in .NET 3.0.
> 
> Not that I know anything about what versions of mono does what, but I 
> was under the impression that .NET 3.0 was purely an API extension 
> (the
> foundations) and didn't introduce language or syntax changes, but uses 
> the 2.0 CLR - it was with .NET 3.5 that MS introduced C# 3.0, I believe.
> 

You're correct, I mixed the two up. (Clear explanation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#.NET_Framework_3.0.) The only desirable framework extension I've come across so far is the HashSet collection, the rest are language extensions.

>> Most of .NET 3.5 is not supported in Mono yet. Visual Studio 2005 is
> more of a support issue than Mono for .NET 3.0.
> 
> "The Mono Compiler is considered feature complete for C# 3.0"
> taken from
> http://www.mono-project.com/CSharp_Compiler
> which also lists the features introduced in C# 3.0 as "supported".
> 
> So, what we're saying here, I believe (again, I'm no mono guy) that we 
> could use C# 3.0 syntactical features from some given release of mono, 
> but still stay wary of the unsupported parts of the .NET API.
> 
> Could we not just
> * Identify in what mono release C# 3.0 was considered syntactically 
> feature complete, and use C# 3.0 syntax from there on
> * say we just need to work together to not introduce any incompatible 
> projects into OpenSim core until the mono people say so
> 
> Just trying to chip in,
> /Stefan
>

I think it's safe to assume that any new language extensions will be supported on all versions of Mono, except versions that no one should be running due to severe memory leak and threading problems (aka 1.2.x). The real issue as Teravus mentioned is whether Visual Studio 2005 should be kept as a valid platform. Since you can download VS2008 Express for free, we're really talking about people who have a professional or enterprise copy of VS2005 that haven't upgraded to VS2008 only. However, this is more people than you might think. We've had this same discussion for libopenmetaverse several times, and are still probably not going to officially switch until Q2 2009 at the earliest.

John