More News from the Front!

A quick update on two exciting developments:

• Banshee now works on the .NET VM. Thanks to a tip from Javier of the Bibli@teca project who directed me toward a different set of GTK libraries.
• Banshee now plays music. I've written a little DirectShow backend which provides all the niceties of playback: play/pause, seeking, volume control, &c. This is a temporary solution until I get GStreamer working, but it's nice to see this sucker actually do what it does.

That's all for now.

Eets Alive!

After weeks of fiddling and false starts, this was the scene on my screen some 120 seconds ago:


Banshee on Windows, baby!

Status Report 1

Well, not much to report unfortunately. I've been desperately trying to get all of the build dependencies up and running on Cygwin. No easy task. For a detailed account of everything involved, and for a continued report of progress, see my project scratch pad. Aaron is moving right now so I'm one my own for the next week or so. I'm going to concurrently start work on the port while I try to get my Windows development environment up and running.

As a post-script to my last post, I also added C# 3.0 Automatic Properties to gmcs. Look for that in SVN!

3rd is the one with the treasure chest

I seem to be on a compiler bent. I just committed the following C# 3.0 features to gmcs:

• Variable type inference (the "var" keyword)
• Anonymous types.
• Implicitly typed arrays.
• Object initialization.
• Collection initialization.

They're in SVN right now, so go check 'em out! A word of warning: the new compiler errors associated with these features are not in place yet, so only write perfect code.

This is my first time under the hood of a compiler (other than my brainfuck compiler). It took me a while to get my bearings but once I was acclimated, everything went smooth like bunnies. mcs is great to work on: it is very well designed. The foundation for all of these new features (particularly anonymous types) was already in place, I essentially just handled the new syntax. Thanks goes to Marek Safar for his help.

Of course, all of these features are so much pretext for LINQ. Atsushi Eno is working on LINQ for XML and Antonello Provenzano has begun LINQ for SQL. Most of my hacking time this summer will go toward my Summer of Code project but if I have extra time I will defiantly look to the Olive project's LINQ implementation.

It Begins

First posts are hard to write so I'll do what I do best: talk about myself. I'm Scott Peterson. I attend New York University and my birthday is coming up soon (April 23rd). I enjoy whole milk and correcting people's grammar (but not their spelling).

Here is a picture of me eating a taco:


Now that we're acquainted, let's to 't. This blog chronicles my Google Summer of Code project to port Banshee to Windows. I may also occasionally post about my other OSS/Mono exploits. For example, I just finished a brainfuck compiler for the CLI (.NET & Mono). It is called brainfucker. It is written in C# and uses the fantastic Mono.Cecil library (cred to JB Evain). It also has a Gtk interface, if that's your thing.

Well, that's all for now. This is surely the beginning of something magnificent. I feel it in my bones!