Mono-Open Source Development platform based on the .NET framework in Linux

What is Mono?™
Mono is a comprehensive open source development platform based on the .NET framework that allows developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications with unprecedented productivity. Mono's .NET implementation is based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure.
Sponsored by Novell the Mono project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community. Mono includes both developer tools and the infrastructure needed to run .NET client and server applications.
Mono includes a compiler for the C# language, an ECMA-compatible runtime engine (the Common Language Runtime, or CLR),and class libraries. The libraries include Microsoft .NET compatibility libraries (including ADO.NET, System.Windows.Forms and ASP.NET), Mono's own and third party class libraries.Gtk#, a set of .NET bindings for the gtk+ toolkit and assorted GNOME libraries can be found in the later. This library allows you to build fully native Gnome application using Mono and includes support for user interfaces built with the Glade interface builder. Furthermore, Mono's runtime can be embedded into applications for simplified packaging and shipping. In addition, the Mono project offers an IDE, debugger, and documentation browser.

Getting Started With C# On Linux

Getting Started With C# On Linux
By Rob Blackwell
When Microsoft launched its .NET strategy, one of the objectives was to allow software to be written for a variety of different platforms. It submitted .NET to ECMA for standardization and many people now consider it to be more "open" and accessible than the Java platform.
Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Ximian is working on Mono - an open source implementation of the .NET framework which runs under Linux.
If, like me, you work with Microsoft technologies, but also tinker with Linux, then you can now write C Sharp programs which run on both platforms. This article takes a brief look at Mono and explains how to install the software and start some simple programming.
Head over to www.go-mono.com and download the latest packaged version of Mono. At the time of writing this is mono-0.10.tar.gz
Before you try to build Mono, you need to make sure that you have fairly new versions of the GIMP Toolkit and Drawing Kit, as well as pkg-config. I have a RedHat 7.2 system and I still had to download and upgrade these packages. You can get them from rpmfind.net and install them as follows: # rpm -Uvh glib2-2.0.0-1.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh glib2-devel-2.0.0-1.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh pkgconfig-0.12.0-1.i386.rpm
The next step is to unpack the Mono distribution file like this:
# tar -zxvf mono-0.10.tar.gz
To install Mono, change into the newly created mono-0.10 directory and type # ./configure
# make
# make install
If all goes well, then you should now have a working Mono system including mcs (The Mono C Sharp Compiler suite) , mono (The Mono Just in Time compiler) and mint (The Mono interpreter). All of which now have useful man pages.
Tradition dictates that the first program we should try out is the famous Hello World, and here it is coded in C Sharp. // Hello World in C Sharp
class Hello {
static void Main() {
System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
}
}
C Sharp programs must end in the .cs suffix. Type this file in (using your favourite text editor) and save it to a file Hello.cs then you can compile it using the following command
# mcs Hello.cs
If you've typed everything correctly and there are no syntax errors, this should generate a MSIL file called Hello.exe which you can try out as follows: # mint Hello.exe
Hello World
The mint interpreter has a number of options including --trace and --debug which are useful for debugging. When your program is finished, you can run it with the JIT compiler to get full performance. # mono Hello.exe
Hello World
The Common Language Runtime provides cross-platform portability. A .NET application can run on any system for which the CLR has been ported. In fact Mono version 0.10 is the first version to be "self hosting" before that, the Mono C Sharp compiler had to be compiled using the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK on Windows and then moved over to Linux. You can take C Sharp programs compiled on Windows and run them on Linux, but at the time of writing there are still a few problems going from Linux to Windows.
Building GUI applications under Mono is still difficult, but work is underway. The Gtk# project at gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net aims to provide C# language bindings for the gtk+ toolkit. The aim is also to provide a Windows.Forms compatible library under Mono. There are several areas, where moving from Microsoft platforms to Linux may be hard, in particular where Microsoft rely on win32 extensions, HWND and HDC handles etc, but much of this has already been thought through by the team.
Mono is not yet a full implementation of the .NET framework, but there is enough there to start writing some interesting programs. New releases are likely to come thick and fast, and the breadth and quality of the base classes will continue to improve.
Miguel de Icaza has hinted at using Mono for GNOME development. Maybe Mono and .NET will help to bring the open source and Microsoft development communities closer together? Useful Sites
www.go-mono.com The home of the Mono project
msdn.microsoft.com/net Microsoft .Net Development
www.aws.netActive Web Solution

India preferred destination for IT enabled services: Ahamed -(CALIBER 05)

India preferred destination for IT enabled services: Ahamed

KOCHI: Union Minister of State for External Affairs E Ahamed stressed the need to use Information Technology for the country's overall development.

Inaugurating the third international convention on Automation of Linraries in Education and Research Institutes (CALIBER) on multilingual computing and information managemen in networked digital environment here, he said e-learning was a new area in distance education. It offered a wide range of opportunities, especially in accessible areas.

E-learning courses were also a new opening, both interactive and innovative and provided learners with invaluable tools in every way, Ahamed said at the convention organised jointly by the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) and Technology and INFLIBNET Centre (UGC), Ahamedabad.

India's had become one of the most preferred destination for software and IT enabled services and the IT industry accounted for 2.6 per cent of GDP and 21.3 per cent of exports during 2003-04.

This was projected to grow to seven per cent of GDP and 35 per cent of exports with an export potential of 60 billion US dollars by 2008, Ahamed said.

DTH adds depth to distance learning - CALIBER '05.

DTH adds depth to distance learning - CALIBER '05.

By K.A. Martin

Dr. S. Ramani, Chairman, INFLIBNET.


KOCHI, FEB. 2. Direct To Home telecast (DTH) and electronic journals have provided a new depth to distance learning and promise to integrate the disparate areas of our vast country into a seamlessly merged community of learners, says S. Ramani, Honorary Chairman of Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET), Hyderabad, the Universities Grants Commission's library networking mission.

Education channel


The emergence of DTH telecast facility now enables even colleges to access the UGC's education channel in the bouquet of Doordarshan channels. "This is an exciting development," says Dr. Ramani.

He was speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the three-day Convention For Automation Of Libraries In Education And Research Institutes — CALIBER 2005.

After successfully networking over a 100 universities in the country, INFLIBNET is targeting colleges. They can now buy a reception facility at a cost of Rs. 7,000 and use it to receive the bouquet of DD channels, which now includes the education channel by the UGC.

Affordable rate


This breaks down the barriers of learning, as even the remotest college will be able to use the facility at affordable rates, says Dr. Ramani, a veteran with the libraries networking mission and also the Director of Science and Technology with the HP Labs India, Bangalore.

The facility will enable a student, sitting in his remote classroom, look through a volcano or look down a microscope, says Dr. Ramani. "You can't take a volcano to a classroom," he adds with a smile on the capability of the new technology to improve classroom learning.

Dr. Ramani said ever since the UGC's Infonet mission got underway in December 2002, it had been a constant race to link universities. The emphasis was on "equity in quality". There should be no rural-urban discrimination when it came to the quality of education material and accessibility to them.

The first step was to use the V-SAT facility. Out of the about 170 universities affiliated to the UGC, 130 had been linked via the Internet. "The others will be linked and it is only a question of time," says Dr. Ramani. In the first instance itself, the UGC had succeeded in taking the Internet revolution to the universities.

e-journals


The second step was to use the collective strength of these universities to access e-journals that were the very best sources of academic materials.

"If a researcher does not know what has been done before, he or she runs the chances of repeating the mistakes of the past or even duplicating efforts." He said e-journals had proved a costly affair for individual universities. Hundred universities had now pooled their resources to subscribe to 3,000 e-journals from all over the world covering all areas of academic interest. "The country spends Rs. 30 crores annually on these journals. However, the price fades into insignificance when you consider that these journals will soon be available to approximately four million students in the plus-two or above levels."

Dr. Ramani said that the UGC had identified about 65 colleges in the country to join the network through the satellite communication service.

Nobel hope for India - George Sudharshan

Dr. Ennakkal Chandy George Sudharshan is regarded as one of the greatest scientists India has ever produced; Dr. Sudarshan has reached the verge of winning the Nobel Prize for Physics. He has been nominated for the coveted Nobel Prize six times. Dr. Sudarshan is known particularly for his cracking revelations, which shattered the established wisdom propounded by Albert Einstein that no particles travel faster than light. The revelations by Dr. Sudarshan about the possible existence of Tachyons created a furore in the scientific world. He has also made many scholarly contributions to the study of Indian philosophy from the point- -of-view of a scientist.
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Dr. Sudarshan is currently a professor of physics at the University of Texas, Austin. B. Sc. (Hons.), Madras (India), 1951; M.A., 1952; Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1958; D. Sc., Honoris. Causa, Wisconsin, 1969. Numerous honorary degrees. Padma Bhushan (Order of the Lotus) decoration by President of India, 1976. First Prize in Physics, Third World Academy of Sciences, 1985. Research interests include Elementary particle physics, quantum optics, quantum field theory, gauge field theories, fibre bundles, classical mechanics, foundations of physics.
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LCD connections: analog vs. digital

LCD connections: analog vs. digital
There are two major types of computer monitors: CRTs, which are based on the same 100-year-old cathode-ray-tube technology as the first television, and LCDs, which are based on newer, liquid-crystal technology. Although CRT monitors are still optimum for some tasks, LCDs look slicker, take up less desk space, and can offer sharper image quality, and as a result, they have begun to dominate the market. Most CRTs offer only an analog connection, but more and more LCDs offer both digital and analog inputs. Which one should you use?

Let's take a step back. A CRT, or cathode-ray tube, monitor is an inherently analog device, while computers are purely digital devices. How does a twentieth-century analog appliance talk to a twenty-first-century digital machine?

Analog (VGA) input
They do so via a graphics card (also called a video card). Most computers have at least one analog input, which is sometimes labeled VGA (for video graphics array) or D-SUB, on the back of the computer.

The graphics card converts the computer's digital signal to an analog one, which it conducts to the monitor via an analog cable. Without getting into too much detail, the CRT monitor takes the analog signal and uses electron guns to manipulate phosphors and, well, it turns the signal into an image.

INFLIBNET

INFLIBNET: Information and Library Network Centre is an autonomous Inter-University Centre (IUC) of University Grants Commission (UGC) involved in creating infrastructure for sharing information among academic and Research and Development Institutions. It is a major National Programme initiated by the UGC in 1991 with its Head Quarters at Gujarat University Campus, Ahmedabad. Initially started as a project under the IUCAA, it became an independent Inter-University Centre in 1996.

INFLIBNET is involved in modernizing university libraries in India and connecting them as well as information centres in the country through a nation-wide high speed data network using the state-of-art technologies for the optimum utilisation of information. INFLIBNET is set out to be a major player in promoting scholarly communication among academicians and researchers in India.

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