• (11:00 – 11:45) Enough Debian packaging knowledge to hurt yourselves slightly less than you do already (Jo Shields)
• (12:00 – 13:00) Mono – State of the Union (Miguel De Icaza)
• (13:00 – 14:00) *** Lunch break ***
• (14:00 – 14:30) Gluon (Federico Di Gregorio)
• (14:40 – 15:25) Banshee: Past, Present, Future and the Crazy stuff (Bertrand Lorentz & Olivier Dufour)
• (15:40 – 16:25) IronPython: Bringing the dynamic world to the CLR (Carlos Alberto Cortez Guevara)
• (16:40 – 17:30) MonoGame (Dominique Louis, Dean Ellis & Kenneth Pouncy)
• (17:45 – 18:15) XWT (Lluis Sanchez)
• (18:30 – 19:00) MonoMac (Miguel De Icaza)

Full details (with talk abstracts) should be available on the FOSDEM website. As always, if you want to see a talk, show up early, once the room is full, you’re out of luck!

Date to put in your agenda: Feb 4, 2012.

Great news! There will be a third edition of the Mono devroom @ FOSDEM. The event will take place on Feb 4 and Feb 5. We have the devroom the entire afternoon, for 6 hours (from 13:00 till 19:00). As I am not planning to fill up all that stage time on my own, we need your talks and presentations to make this day extra interesting.

Talks on any topic are fine, as long as it’s related to Mono and open-source. These do not need to be life-changing project announcements either: deeply technical things or pet projects that will make us all giggle with hacker joy are just as desired.

Please send your talk proposals using this form: http://bit.ly/vK2WC6

You have until Dec 31 to send in talks. A final schedule will be made available on Jan 10.

Not that we get more talks than we can schedule each year, so we’ll unfortunately have to make a selection.

If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me.

This means that TagLib# (used by Banshee, F-Spot and others) can now serve as your one-stop .NET library for handling audio, video and image metadata. And did I mention that it’s deliciously open-source, making it usable in any project you’d like?

Download
Source-Code and more info

• Welcome F# to the MonoDevelop family (Tomas Petricek) [Slides] [Examples]
• Manos: web apps for the lazy hacker (Jérémie Laval) [Slides]
• The Web Objects Kitchen (Federico Di Gregorio) [Slides]
• Mono packaging in Debian and Ubuntu – why we’re always right (Jo Shields) [Slides]
• Mono C++ Interop (Andreia Gaita) ) [Slides]
• Mono’s new garbage collector (Mark Probst) [Slides + Audio Recording]
• A common graph database access layer for .NET/Mono (Achim Friedland) [Slides]
• CloudB: a distributed hybrid storage system for the Mono framework (Antonello Provenzano) [Slides]

The trollcat experiment
A couple of months ago while sending out the call-for-papers for the 2011 Mono room, I added this question to the submission form:

The majority ticked "Yes".

Looking back at my statistics from last weekend, over 90% of the speakers did in fact include some imagery of opinionated animals or cartoon figures, often comically yet clearly strengthening the discourse. I would like to present this observation as a data point in the ongoing research on the finer points of trollcats in contemporary society which is being carried out by Miguel for some time now.

• (13:00 – 13:10) Opening (Ruben Vermeersch)
• (13:10 – 13:50) Welcome F# to the MonoDevelop family (Tomas Petricek)
• (14:00 – 14:25) Manos: web apps for the lazy hacker (Jérémie Laval)
• (14:30 – 14:55) The Web Objects Kitchen (Federico Di Gregorio)
• (15:00 – 15:20) Making happy developers (Rodrigo Kumpera)
• (15:30 – 16:00) Mono packaging in Debian and Ubuntu – why we’re always right (Jo Shields)
• (16:00 – 16:20) *** Coffee Break ***
• (16:20 – 16:50) Mono C++ Interop (Andreia Gaita)
• (17:00 – 17:40) Mono’s new garbage collector (Mark Probst)
• (17:50 – 18:20) A common graph database access layer for .NET/Mono (Achim Friedland)
• (18:30 – 19:00) CloudB: a distributed hybrid storage system for the Mono framework (Antonello Provenzano)

Sat, February 5 is the date to remember, put it on your calendars!

If you would like to present in the Mono Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, it is time to send your talk now! The deadline for doing so is in a bit over a week: Dec 25 (that’s christmas indeed, but don’t wait until that day to send in your presents).

More info about how to submit your talk here.

This is quite significant: aside from audio and video files, Taglib# is now capable of handling metadata embedded in a large range of image formats.

Some nice features:

• Support for JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and a large number of RAW image formats.
• Full support for XMP and EXIF (no IPTC yet).
• Fully implemented in managed code, so instantly cross-platform.
• Extremely capable (exposing all the internal metadata structure if you want), but with an additional convenience API if you don’t want to deal with the pain.
• And obviously, deliciously free software, for any purpose you want!

However, the best feature in my opinion is built-in paranoia. All of this code has been tested to the extreme, with over 33.000 lines of unit tests. We test things like data consistency across read/write scenarios, parsing correctness and completeness and generally avoid regressions. Everything is also cross-validated with specifications and the exiv2 library.

If we are only slightly unsure about how to parse some bits of data, Taglib# will flat-out refuse to write to the file. This is important: when dealing with people’s digital memories, you do not want to risk data-loss.

If you’re looking for a feature-full, well-tested and fully-managed .Net library for metadata, this might be the solution for you.

Many thanks to Mike Gemünde for his efforts, this work is just as much of a result of his labor as it was of mine.

The Heads, Knysna, South-Africa (A very enjoyable place to relax!)

We are looking for speakers to fill up the room, which we have on Saturday, February 5 (13:00 – 19:00). If you have made nice and cool things with or related to Mono and you want to show it to the world, this is your chance!

Fill in the form now!

Do it before Dec 25, as we’ll need some time to handle confirmations and finalize the schedule in time before the deadline imposed to us by the FOSDEM organizers.

Hope to see everyone there!