MonoTorrent underwent a lot of under the hood changes recently to bring things more in line with the bittorrent specs. I also finished off the implementation of the Fast Peers Extensions, so downloads with monotorrent should be faster when used in swarms that have other clients supporting the Fast Peers Extensions.

A majorly important fix went in today which prevents incoming connections which have just been created from being closed. This should improve things substantially and hopefully remove a long running bug of invalid AsyncRequests being passed into EndXXX methods.

Also, after talking with Ty Norton (http://blog.aproductofsociety.org/) who is hosting www.monotorrent.com, he told me that there have been 211.37 megabytes of downloads of monotorrent so far this month. Considering the zip file is a mere 154kB in size, that's over 1300 downloads! Not too bad. Now, if only i got bug reports from one tenth of those people, i'd be happy.

Or maybe MonoTorrent is so good it doesn't throw any exceptions... who knows ;)

MonoTorrent beta 2 is now out. It has a good few bug fixes, a good few extra features and hopefully is more stable than before.

Keep the bug reports coming in guys!

MonoTorrent home page

I leave my house in an hour for the sunny italian slopes where hopefully there'll be enough snow for a weeks snowboarding. It's my last break before i go back to college. I'm looking forward to it, mostly because i'm beginning to get bored at home and haven't seen some of my friends in a while. The results for our christmas tests are also coming out then, which isn't really something to look forward to ;) Sure we'll see how it goes :p

Hopefully by the time i get back, stubbing on Mono.XNA will be complete. We're oh so close to reaching that magical 100% stubbed mark. After that, with a bit of planning and discussion, we'll be able to start hacking our way through the implementation phases in a more controlled manner as opposed to dropping code in all over the place.

MonoTorrent will start getting some much needed love and attention over the coming weeks (or so i plan). I have a few things planned which i can't wait to get cracking on.

Mono.NAT (the uPnP library) is also in pretty good shape. I received a patch a few days ago which fixed a lot fo FxCop warnings and updated the library to CLS compliance. So feel free to give that a shot for all your uPnP port mapping needs.

Finally, do keep track of the Mono.XNA status at http://xna.taoframework.com/ClassStatus.html and http://xna.taoframework.com/ClassStatusGame.html. I won't be able to keep it updated while i'm away, but i did update it a few hours ago.

So Mono.XNA took a big (ish) step forward today with thanks to a big commit from RobLoach. Now, hopefully he'll write some NUnit tests to cover that code.

Take a look at the video linked at the end. It shows Mono.XNA successfully rendering an array of colours to the screen one after another in a loop. Render-licios. Next step, we want to be able to render multiple colours to the screen at the same time. I'm thinking a nice checkerboard pattern would be good. We'll see ;)

The video is encoded using x264. If you can't play it, VLC will play it. Just google "vlc" and download away.

http://xna.taoframework.com/SimpleExample.mp4

I had a brain wave earlier regarding Mono.XNA while working on some code. I was wondering if we could come up with an easy way to figure out what methods need to be implemented in order to make game X run and i realised MoMa was perfect for the job!

After a quick talk with jonathon pobst, an svn update and a few mins hardcoding i generated the required files that MoMa needs in order to scan assemblies for me. A few mins later i had some stats ready.

Firstly, the simple example hits no methods that throw NotImplementedExceptions. That confused me, as i knew that the simple example doesn't run! So i started looking at some code. It turns out there are some classes where the methods weren't stubbed out with NotImplemented exceptions. So that's a little annoying. However it shouldn't take too long to fix that up.

Then i compiled the Pong example that robloach commited to SVN (thanks for including some makefiles/project files ;) ). I ran the Pong example through MoMa and i came up with the following list of methods that need to be implemented. Clicky Linky.

So, the plan is to get people working on the simple example until we can get it running. Then we work on Pong until it works. I'd guesstimate* that the Simple example will be running within a month.


*Guesstimates are accurate to +- 1 decade.

It's been a bit quiet on the blog recently. Firstly, let me wish everyone a happy new year. I hope everyone had a safe new year celebration. I spent the last few days recovering from a bout of ye olde vomiting bug, so that kept me from doing too much work.

As far as XNA goes, Sandriman has updated a few classes to reflect the changes from the beta to the final release. The current status of the Mono.Xna library can be seen here. The status of the Xna.Game.dll library can be seen here.

As far as implementation goes, we have a target. The plan is to implement classes on a need-to-implement basis. Our first milestone is to get a basic pong clone working on Mono.XNA. More on that will follow as soon as i know more ;)

For now, i'm back off to bed to rest and recover.