Monsoon - blowing down barriers

Yes, Monsoon is now using Mono.Addins for some delicious plugability. Support for this has only just been added, so there is a severe lack of extension points defined in monsoon, but those can be added as time goes on. Right now there is one extension point. I'm sure you've already guessed what it is.


Yup, that's right. That little nifty thing at the bottom is DHT bootstrapping itself. As you can see, it's currently displaying a rather disappointing value of '1' for 'Nodes'. This is either because the bootstrap node is currently unavailable, or my router is playing silly buggers again and not forwarding my ports right. Luckily you can also bootstrap into DHT by just downloading a normal torrent. Other peers advertise when they support DHT and provide the required info to allow you to use them as a bootstrap node.

What this means is that opensuse users will finally have easy access to a DHT enabled torrent client without having to enable additional repositories. Things will work right out of box... well, it'll work as soon as you click to enable the addin which fetches it from the monsoon website ;)

Once I solidify everything there'll be a preview release of Monsoon with these features and another slightly big one I've been working on. More on that later. I've reached my word quota for this post ;)

Book memes - Reloaded

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

"Ponder and Ridcully waited for a few moments, but the city stayed full of normal noise, like the collapse of masonry and distant screams"

Not a bad quote, eh? And yes, I am still a kid at heart :p

Polymorphism, why do you fail me?

Polymorphism, it's the cornerstone of object oriented programming. We couldn't live without it. So then, tell me why this rather trivial case fails to compile.

public class B : A { }

public void Foo (ref A bar) {  }

public void Baz ()
{
    B b = new B ();
    Foo (ref b);
}

The issue is hat you can't pass a 'B' parameter type by ref where a 'ref A' is expected. Why is this? What case could possibly fail if this was allowed?

So what've I been working on?

I haven't actually blogged much about my job. That was getting kind of weird, so I thought it was high time I wrote something. Then I thought to myself "A picture is worth a thousand words, so why bother wasting my time with words". So here are two pictures which show what I've been doing over the last 5 days. Though technically i've been working on parts of this over the last 2-3 weeks ;)

Moonlight - Monday 11th May 2009:


Moonlight - Friday 15th May 2009 (with local patches):


Pretty sweet, eh?

UPDATE: If you want to look at the actual site, it's available here: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html

Hopefully our next alpha preview will contain the necessary fixes to load the site up so you can see it in all its glory.