Jb in a nutshell

Quite a number of friends pinged me about the recent release of the CCI, under the Ms-PL, and were curious about my take on it, and its effect on Cecil and its ecosystem.

First of all, there’s a bit of a story here, and I’ll write it here for those who like me, love software history. Back in the years 2003 and 2004, I was working with Thomas Gil, one of my mentor and programming hero, on one of the first static aspect weaver on .net, AspectDNG, now abandoned. I was actively researching better ways to do CIL injection.

We went from raw IL text manipulation, to Reflection and Reflection.Emit using Lutz’s ILReader library, to RAIL, until I decide to work on Cecil.

In the meantime, I’ve stumbled upon ILMerge, a tool from Mike Barnett, and mailed him to ask what powered the tool, and he put me in contact with Herman Venter, the man behind the CCI effort. I wrote Herman a couple of mails, in a terrible English, and begged him to push for a release of the CCI under a license we could use in AspectDNG. That was in March 2004.

As you can guess, it quite didn’t work out at that time, so I started working on Cecil. A few weeks after, Miguel blogged about the need of such library. He already had the Mono Linker in mind. I mailed him, got SVN access, checked in the beginning of Cecil, got Sébastien interested, etc.

I had the opportunity to be invited by Microsoft to attend an informal AOP workshop the year later, and to met with Herman, which I remember as a very nice person. I am not sure he remembers the terribly shy kid that did a terrible presentation in a terrible English. But all in all, I’m happy that five years later, my request went through.

Now the CCI release in its own CodePlex page is not really a big event, as it was already released and licensed under the Ms-PL, as it’s part of Sandcastle.

Anyway, Cecil is quite mature in its current form, it’s used by a fair number of (known) applications (please help to improve the list), and I’m currently working on two things.

The first one is a refactoring of Cecil, which vastly reduces memory consumption as well as reading/writing time. Hopefully I’ll have a beta in a month or so. We have great plans for this version of Cecil, and it’s consuming a lot of my time, more on this later.

The second one is an extensible decompiler, Cecil.Decompiler, that will greatly benefit from the Cecil refactoring. The time I dedicate to it is a bit phagocyted by the Cecil refactoring right now, but it’s certainly one of my favorite project.

The CCI is a combination of Cecil, the decompiler, and something to write a decompiled AST back, which will be the natural evolution of the Cecil decompiler. Note that the CCI decompilation/compilation process is not extensible. Now that it’s open source, you can hack it yourself, sadly, the CCI code is well, a bit messy to be polite, or not exactly a joy to read. Also you probably won’t be able to contribute back to the CCI.

Anyway, it does its job alright, and so does Cecil. Choice is always good, let’s welcome the CCI in the small family of such tools. I, for one, will surprisingly keep hacking on and with Cecil :)

To conclude on a very positive note, the fantastic thing about this release is that the CCI contains a fully managed PDB reader and writer. That’s great news as so far, we failed to get any details about this file format. This means that we can now implement a fully managed Mono.Cecil.Pdb support, and that’s just great.

UPDATE: it appears that only the PDB reader is fully managed, the PDB writer is just a wrapper over the COM stuff, just like the current implementation of Mono.Cecil.Pdb. Well, at least it’s a start.

Previously, in Jb in a nutshell: AOP Goes .NET Workshop

It was my first trip to US, and I liked it.
It was the first time I had to spend almost 24 hours in planes/airport (just for the trip back), and I hated it.

Anyway, the workshop was interesting. It’s clear that Microsoft don’t know how to handle the AOP thing, but at least, it helped a bit. It was very interesting to meet people so motivated by working on AOP on .net. And now, they all know that they can use Cecil as a base assembly to write AOP tool! I will write more on it later on.

To make you wait, a little game, play to: where is Jb ?

I’ll be there

• Microsoft Research AOP Goes .NET Workshop 2005

If you are around between Nov 12-16 and want to talk about AspectDNG and/or Mono.Cecil, drop me a mail !

I’ve played with Lego today

Well, it was some kind of special Lego… I’ve taken bricks from :

• A nice tutorial about Tray Icons for GNOME
• An perfect and simple example
• An amazing Mono Live
• GPL icons from a nice project
• A simple ATOM feed

With those bricks, I’ve made a very simple and totally incomplete GMail Notification Icon for GNOME. It looks like that:

Yet, it’s no really usable. Username and password are hard-coded, and you just know if you have, or not, unread mails.

If someone is willing to use my code to produce a better applet, he would not have a lot of things to do. The list is simple:

• Use GConf to save username and password
• Write a really simple window to ask user whether or not username and password have to be stored
• Write another simple window to be shown when a new mail arrives, and then disappears

This nice person will find the code here: GMailTray