Friday, May 18, 2007

Mono 1.2.4 - the best ASP.NET 2.0 release so far

With Mono 1.2.4 released, the ASP.NET 2.0 support is nearly complete (with the exception of WebParts and the management APIs) and what we're looking into now is making sure all the little incompatibilities, missing APIs etc. are added and tested.

As part of this effort, I've recently tested all the non-data samples in the .Net QuickStarts set (available either online at http://quickstarts.asp.net/ or with the .NET SDK) and fixed quite a few little bugs or incompatibilities. Unfortunately the changes aren't part of the Mono 1.2.4 release but, as before, I recommend that you use the svn trunk version of Mono (or a daily snapshot) for your 2.0 development and testing. The data controls will be tested as soon as we update our SqlClient implementation with some features that'll help in the testing.
A note about testing the QuickStarts with xsp2 on Mono. The online QuickStarts site uses probably virtual directories in IIS to make sure that the samples which are fully-contained applications get their configuration and paths right. If you run xsp2 in the aspnet/ QuickStarts directory and notice that some don't work, just go to their source folder and run xsp2 from there.
Currently, again as part of the .NET conformance testing, I'm porting several ASP.NET 2.0 applications (starter kits and others) to use PostgreSQL instead of MS SQL - this will allow them to be fully hosted on Unix. I will blog about the ports as they happen.