For all of you that missed it, I highly recommend planning on attending it next year.  If you did miss it, this year is not completely lost as the awesome folks over at Monkey Square are planning on making the videos of the sessions available at some future date.

I had a great time meeting some awesome people and attending some great sessions.  There are several really exciting technologies out there that are worth following discussed at the conference.

Here is a bit of a recap of some of the sessions that I attended.

First, The top secret keynote that Miguel De Icaza delivered.  The major topic was the release of Mono 3.0 and the future of the ecosystem.  Some of the really cool features of Mono 3.0 is full c# 5.0, System.Net.Http, TPL DataFlow, Code Contracts, entity framework, razor, asp.net mvc 4, F# 3.0, and 64bit support on OS X.  The 3.0 release is very exciting not to mention lots of ‘lameness’ will be going away with the new async stuff.  There are also improvements to sgen the new garbage collection system in Mono that should help improve performance.  Mono is seeing a lot of success in the gaming side of the market as well.  Some other areas that will receive focus are code analysis, bug finding, and profiling tools.  In the next year Xamarin expects to deliver new MonoTouch and Mono for Android versions based on 3.0.  Very exciting stuff!!!

Second, ServiceStack.  This was a very full session and I was lucky to find a spot to stand in at the back of the room.  Sadly this meant that I missed parts of this presentation, but definitely plan to look more seriously into it once I get the chance as a replacement for wcf.  Hopefully the video comes out sooner than later for this one!

Third, GitHub.  Phil Haack did a great job presenting on GitHub and the awesomeness that it is.  I had seen some of it before, but really like seeing the command line style interface that is built into the web interface in action.  He also did a demo of the API that is available and there were some really cool things in there.  I’m very interested in the possibility to integrate pull requests into some Continuous Integration system.  It would be cool to know right away if the pull request would break the build or not.

Fourth, Vernacular.  Aaron Bockover, now a Xamarin employee, was great enough to post his slides here.  If you are working on a project that is targeting multiple platforms and need it to support multiple locales then this is definitely a project you need to check out.  Very promising!

Fifth, Mobile Development with C#(book).  Greg Shackles is definitely someone to follow and watch in this market segment.  He has been doing some great work including writing a book about it.  If you are considering writing a mobile app that is targeting multiple platforms I definitely recommend picking up this book.

Sixth, Effective MonoDevelop.  Michael Hutchinson is an awesome developer that has contributed a great deal to the MonoDevelop project.  His blog has some great tips that makes using MonoDevelop even better.  It is definitely worth the read.

Apart from all of the sessions there was plenty of time to hang out with some rockstars in the Mono community.  It is always great to chat with them in person and get feedback on questions and problems.  I am definitely looking forward to next year’s conference!  Keep up the great work!

I have left the repository on git.gnome.org/f-spot and will try to sync up changes in master regularly. I’d like to thank the awesome GNOME project for hosting F-Spot and want to be clear that I have absolutely no plans of dropping GNOME support in F-Spot nor diminish F-Spot’s GNOME integration in the future. On the contrary, as the .NET bindings for the GNOME  3  platform are improving I expect to be working on further GNOME integration for F-Spot.

The goal in moving F-Spot over to GitHub is purely for the benefit of its development technically as well as to breath new life into the project through the wider GitHub community and feature set.  Github provides several really cool features, one of the features that I’m looking forward to taking advantages of is the pull request system.

Currently, contributors will typically clone a repository, create a patch that fixes some bug, file that bug in Bugzilla and attach the patch, which then sit and wait in the hope that the developers will notice the bug and accept the patch.  What seems to happen with projects, particularly F-Spot, is those bugs will sit there and bit rot.  Either someone will come alone, see the bug and possibly rebase the patch against git master or it’ll be forgotten until it’s no longer valid.  The pull request interface isn’t some silver bullet, but I see it making the process much simpler and much more discoverable for both patch contributors and maintainers alike.

With the GitHub system, it’s really simpler for any user to come along and fork F-Spot.  Once forked they can fix a bug and do a pull request.  At this point there is a nice list of pull requests or shame list (a list of all the patches I haven’t addressed yet!).  There are some other features such as issue tracking and a built-in wiki that comes with GitHub which I’m not sure if it will get used, but time will tell.

Another goal I have for the project is to port it over to OS X and Windows.  GitHub has a nice client for both platforms as well as conveying the idea that F-Spot is intended to be cross-platform application with GNOME support more clearly than being on GNOME’s git does.

I hope everyone will appreciate this new workflow and will enjoy the improvements that are to come in F-Spot.  I’m excited to continue development on F-Spot and look forward to the future of such an awesome photo management.

MonkeySpace, formerly known as Monospace, is the official cross platform and open-source .NET conference. Want to learn more about developing for the iPhone, Android, Mac, and *nix platforms using .NET technologies? How about developing games or learning more about open-source projects using .NET technologies? MonkeySpace has provided an annual venue to collaborate, share, and socialize around these topics and more.

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I’m really exciting to see all the new stuff that is going on in the mono world. Looks like they have some awesome presentations and presenters lined up for this conference. If you have some time and going to be in the area you’d be foolish to not attend.

Of course, big thanks to the awesome sponsors and not to be forgotten the organizers!

Also, pay attention to Open Space on the last day from 13:45 – 17:15. Come and help contribute to open source projects! I’ll be there working on f-spot.

Also, a huge thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel to this event!

This time we are changing the location a little.  We are still having the party on Novell’s Provo campus, but in one of the executive briefing rooms building H which is the tall south most building.

Everyone is welcome.  If you are planning on coming please let us know by sending me an email sshaw ]at[ decriptor ]dot[ com.  We are hoping to have food and swag to give away.

Details:

March 17, 2011

6:30 to 8:00 pm

Executive Briefing Center, Building H

Novell Provo Campus

Here is the poster we threw together.  The artwork was provided by someone in the community and the poster was put together by my awesome wife.

So, a huge thanks to all.

So, if you’d like to join us and show your appreciation for all that Bryen has done we ask that you donate what you can at this link: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/13645

FireBreath aims to be a cross-platform plugin architecture, targeting:

• NPAPI browsers on windows, mac, and linux:
  • Gecko/Firefox
  • Google Chrome
  • Apple Safari
• ActiveX Control hosts:
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8

FireBreath is licensed under a dual license structure; this means you can choose which of two licenses to use it under. FireBreath can be used under the New BSD license or the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1.

Here is his announcement and reflections on starting an open source project.

Over the last several months a fair amount of attention has been paid to improving at-spi2 as well.  For those that don’t know what at-spi2 is its the next generation of Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface.  The new at-spi2 using dbus in an effort to remove corba and bonobo from the gnome stack.

A huge benefit of this work is that kde will be able to use it without pulling in a bunch of gnome dependencies allowing for a clean desktop independent accessibility infrastructure.

Some release details:

• Improved compatibility with AT-SPI2, including fixes and performance.
• More compatibility with Silverlight Accessibility for UIA Clients.
• Caching improvements in UIA Client API.
• Support for custom providers and client-side providers.

As well as where you can find the packages:

• openSUSE 11.2 - 1-Click Install
• Ubuntu Karmic Koala - Package Archive on Launchpad
• Fedora 12 - Repository on openSUSE Build Service
• Source tarballs

For more details – The UIA Team Blog

The next thing I want to mention is that I’ve started to work on an openSUSE 11.2 based iFolder appliance that will include, as of right now, iFolder 3.8.  I’ll be posting links to the test images for anyone that would like to help test, comment, contribute, etc.  Please feel free to post bugs to the project page and I’ll do my best to fix them.