Short example: recently I wanted to use a datagrid with one column being a checkbox and I wanted it to be as nice and easy as a command button (events and all). Of course there are ways to do this but none that easy. I wanted to see what others had done - surely others have wanted to do this too. I went to the Code Project website (http://www.codeproject.com/) and sure enough found a couple of examples. I'm sure all worked just fine but none of them were well integrated and each had their own setbacks. I went to the mono code and saw exactly how this mechanism works and within an hour I had an awesome answer that was perfectly integrated (well I thought so :) anyhow). But this would only have happened because I knew about the mono doc. Selfishly I don't want to tell anyone that the absolute best kept secret on the internet is Mono. But it's definitely more fun to show people and see their reaction.
I imagine as I move on to other pure mono.net technologies there will be plenty more rewards to come and I'll keep using the sources where I can/should. I would love to see how people so used to the way that Microsoft presents their Help docs and then have something of equal quality with the code behind it - unheard of!! Ok, back to work for me...
Cheers and thanks for listening
Chris
Gustavo Ramos wrote:
I can imagine a world of difficulties in getting this to actually work (the biggest of which being flux in the codebase) but this would be phenomenal if it could actually be pulled off. Really, any major open source project that could pull something like this off would see a huge swell in developer contribution. Getting over the critical knowledge hump that would make me useful to the project is the main bit holding me back.
Right! In the long term, it would bring back a lot of contributions to mono. However this could be a huge task, comparable to the work needed for a book. It could be a great candidate project for novell investments.
Personally would prefer a straight reading book format, instead of cross-linked sources documents. They would be valuable as a reference for the mono hacker, who knows --at least-- how the beast work. A book format should do for those interested in learning the mono internals from scratch. If that results in a huge project, the book could skip the basics of compilers design.
I'm reading the book "Compilers. Principles, technics and tools.", it's great, but a rather hard reading style. Apart from that, it's a lot of theory, and don't dive into real implementations. Another book, which title "Inside C#" suggests the internal side of C# doesn't go far, it's rather a book for C# language learning, with just a few comments about IL and other internals. However, Tom Archer (the Author of the latter) wrote his book while he was learning C#, because at the time of the writing .net was at beta stage. Well, mixing said things, it would be not so hard to write a Mono book about internals while learning it. Compilers design theory however couldn't be avoided at all, as it is intimately linked to the implementation. I'd love to see someone taking such an item :-)
I'd be happy to write it, but unfortunately don't have the time. Food and survival is first :-( Please, if someone would like to swap writing subjects (e.g. blog <=> book), there would be a lot of interest out there for it. Maybe someone about to write a thesis?
Regards,
Gustavo
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