Jb in a nutshell

Previously, in Jb in a nutshell: AOP Goes .NET Workshop

It was my first trip to US, and I liked it.
It was the first time I had to spend almost 24 hours in planes/airport (just for the trip back), and I hated it.

Anyway, the workshop was interesting. It’s clear that Microsoft don’t know how to handle the AOP thing, but at least, it helped a bit. It was very interesting to meet people so motivated by working on AOP on .net. And now, they all know that they can use Cecil as a base assembly to write AOP tool! I will write more on it later on.

To make you wait, a little game, play to: where is Jb ?

I’ll be there

• Microsoft Research AOP Goes .NET Workshop 2005

If you are around between Nov 12-16 and want to talk about AspectDNG and/or Mono.Cecil, drop me a mail !

I’ve played with Lego today

Well, it was some kind of special Lego… I’ve taken bricks from :

• A nice tutorial about Tray Icons for GNOME
• An perfect and simple example
• An amazing Mono Live
• GPL icons from a nice project
• A simple ATOM feed

With those bricks, I’ve made a very simple and totally incomplete GMail Notification Icon for GNOME. It looks like that:

Yet, it’s no really usable. Username and password are hard-coded, and you just know if you have, or not, unread mails.

If someone is willing to use my code to produce a better applet, he would not have a lot of things to do. The list is simple:

• Use GConf to save username and password
• Write a really simple window to ask user whether or not username and password have to be stored
• Write another simple window to be shown when a new mail arrives, and then disappears

This nice person will find the code here: GMailTray

ildasm

I’ve spent two days refactoring the old code i’ve wrote for ildasm. After that, i realized i was wrong in the way i should have made it. I’m currently using the top level of Cecil, manipulating ITypeDefinition, ICustomAttribute, etc. This is plain wrong for a disassembler, that need more low level access. So i have to rewrite it using the middle level, manipulating metadata tables, signatures, byte arrays, etc. I have to go this way because there is a loss of data when you go a level up of abstraction, for instance, i miss all the metadata tokens, that Msft’s ildasm prints in comments. I also want to implement natively the /adv switch of Msft’s ildasm, that has been proved to be very usefull when you write compilers, or other assembly manipulating tools. Two days lost. It will learn me to think better before starting writing code i guess. As soon as i have something usable, you’ll find it in the cecil module of Mono’s SVN.

Academic days

I’ve spent three days last week near the Eiffel tower, at Microsoft’s academic days. Some very good sessions, one about the Phoenix project, guys, they are working on what i have in my mind for years. It’s very impressive, maybe my school could apply to the academic program associated. I’ve met Serge Lidin, that is the author of Microsoft’s ildasm, ilasm, peverify, and so on. He talked about the future of the MSIL language, there is not a lot of work to provide to be .net 2 compatible in those tools. Patrice have a pic of me, talking to both Serge Lidin and Mark Lewin, from the SSCLI project, (i’m in the middle) :

It seems that my talk about AOP and AspectDNG was not so bad, some people contratulate me after, and I had a lot of good questions. Anyway, people like researchers love AOP. You can download my slides : “Meet Alice” (yeah, AspectDNG is wonderful…, sorry, it is written in french). So it was three real good days (eating very good food for free, in an hotel the room was bigger than my apartment during three days was cool too).

A funny anecdote, there was a little talk about Mono, it was quite good, the guy used my slides from the DotNetGuru’s Symposium, and at the end, he claims that he wanted to show the PetShopDNG running on the top of XSP, but that it does not works. He tried, but XSP was reporting an exception. Fortunately, i’ve made running the PetShopDNG on Mono, and i’ve even presented it at the DotNetGuru’s Symposium, and i saw the exception. In fact, the PetShopDNG was simply misconfigured. I told it to the guy, that invited me to make this thing work. After two little changes in the Web.config, the PetShopDNG was running on the top of XSP, without any modification. Really cool. As it was the end of the talk, i’ve asked for questions about Mono, and for 15 minutes, i’ve answered to them. It’s good too see that people are really interested in Mono.

Levenshtein Distance

Following Nat’s links, i’ve discovered the Levenshtein Distance algorithm, so i decided to write it in C#. Thanks to others examples, it was really easy, and i still don’t know why i did that. You’ll find the whole stuff, including simples tests here : http://evain.net/public/Levenshtein.zip.