[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.4.2 and pnetlib 0.2.6 released

[Rhys Weatherley]

Just in time for the 1 Year Anniversay of DotGNU and Portable.NET,
I've released new versions of Portable.NET and pnetlib:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.4.2.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.2.6.tar.gz

Lots of small fixes this release.  Portable.NET now has sufficient
capabilities to compile and run simple Gtk# applications.

The biggest change to pnetlib was in the System.Security.Cryptography
namespace.

In honour of the 1 year anniversay, I have temporarily made available
the pnet and pnetlib tarballs from a year ago so you can see just
how far we've come:

        http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.1.0.tar.gz
        http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.0.1.tar.gz

See the appended NEWS entries for the full details.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.4.2 (25 July 2002)

Runtime engine:

* Marshal "ref String[]" parameters, to support Gtk#.
* Internalcalls for "Marshal", "CryptoMethods", "Thread".
* Fix verification of "ldobj" when native int types are used.
* Replace the internalcall for "String.EqualRange" with
  "String.FindInRange" (based on a suggestion by Gopal V).

C# Compiler:

* Delegate creation expressions and "+="/"-=" operators.
* Semantic analysis and code generator for events.
* Add the "-gtk" and "-gnome" options to the compiler, to pre-select
  all of the libraries necessary for Gtk# and Gnome#.
* Code generation for casting pointer values.
* Integrate the linker directly into the compiler so that it isn't
  necessary to call out to a separate process to do the link.
* Handle "-E" properly.
* Fix level detection for delegates, so that nested delegate types
  are declared correctly.
* Quick and dirty support for the "DllImport" attribute.
* Fix code generation for the "ldelema" instruction, which should
  have a type argument.
* Jump to the type when doing forward-declaration of enumerated fields,
  so that default field values are processed in the correct order.
* Stack clobbering bug in "foreach" compilation fixed.

Documentation and Samples:

* Doxygen configuration file (C H Gowri Kumar).
* gtk-sharp.HOWTO file, which describes using Portable.NET with Gtk#.
* Table generation bugs in csdoc2html and csdoc2texi (Gopal V).

Assembler:

* Allow assembly references to be specified implicity to better handle
  transitive assembly dependencies.

Linker:

* Fixed a bug in the handling of assembly names that contained ".",
  but did not end in ".dll".  e.g. "System.Xml".
* Set the permissions on executable files to "+x".
* Memory corruption bug in the conversion of method signatures with
  more than 3 parameters.

Loader and Metadata:

* Prepend "lib" to the name of a shared object if it isn't present.
* Modify the assembly resolution algorithm so that it can tolerate
  Mono assemblies on the path and select the Portable.NET versions.
* Minor bug in "ILDebugIterInit" that caused debug loading to lock up.

Csant:

* Add the "csdoc" task to generate XML-ized documentation with csdoc.
* Separate source and build directories to support out of tree builds.
* Implement property substitution in task parameters.
* Off by 1 bug in the processing of the "excludes" list.
* Add the "basedir" attribute to "file", to override the default.
* Add the "sanewarnings" attribute, to turn off annoying compiler
  warning messages that don't mean anything.

Platform Support:

* Small fixes to various files for 64-bit platform support.
* Host detection for GNU/Hurd (Andrew Mitchell).
* Cryptographic algorithms: SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, AES, RC2,
  DES, and Triple-DES.
* Big number arithmetic routines, to support RSA and DSA.
* Remove "test -ot" from build scripts, because older versions of
  Solaris do not understand it.

Other:

* Make the assembly search patch logic consistent across all tools.
* Support for out of tree builds (Stephen Compall).
* Added the "ildd" program, which prints assembly and PInvoke
          dependencies.
* Change instances of the word "namespace" to "nspace" in the headers,
  to make it easier to use the libraries from C++ code.
* Copy "csunit" from pnetlib to pnet and make it more automake-friendly.
* New debian packaging scripts (Andrew Mitchell).

pnetlib 0.2.6 (25 July 2002)

* System.Xml.XmlReader (Charlie Carnow).
* "Marshal" class and supporting types to round out the PInvoke classes.
* Extra classes that are required by Gtk#.
* Be careful when comparing delegates so that we don't get the "==" and
  "!=" operators when we shouldn't be using them.
* Fix range checks in System.String.
* System.Security.Cryptography namespace.
* Replace the internalcall for "String.EqualRange" with
  "String.FindInRange" (based on a suggestion by Gopal V).
* System.Uri/MakeRelative (Rich Baumann, Stephen Compall).