I'll be giving a presentation about mono on Thursday Feb 10,  2005 at the Nashville Visual Studio .NET User's Group meeting hosted at Tek Systems.

I plan to give an introduction to mono with an emphasis on developing ASP.NET applications in Visual Studio for deployment on mono.  I've learned a lot about mono through my work with mojoPortal and hope my presentation will help other .NET developers get started using mono.

I finally got around to testing the new release of  SlickUpload on my new Suse 9.1 test machine running mono 1.0.5

Sorry to say, but as I expected it doesn't work. It doesn't raise any errors but it doesn't upload the file.
See my previous post for the reasons I believe it doesn't work. Its not a problem with SlickUpload, its a lack of implementation in mono for functionality that exists in the ASP.NET/IIS stack.

It is possible that new functionality is available in the mono 1.1.x development branch that may make it into the next release build of mono (I'm doubtful but trying to be optimistic).  Sometime in the near future I plan to setup another test machine and getting frequent updates of the mono 1.1 branch using subversion and doing the builds myself so I can stay on top of the newest features.  It seems from the mailing list that a lot of times when people report bugs the answer is that its fixed in the latest code if you get it from the subversion repository. I think you almost have to be using daily builds to report bugs effectively. I'l post on this topic again after I get setup for doing builds from subversion.  It will be a good learning opportunity for me.

Update:12:33pm

Got an e-mail from Chris Hynes that gives me more hope that this is working in the developer branch. More motivation to learn how to build mono from svn. 

I just got done setting up another test machine for mono ASP.NET deployment using Suse 9.1 Pro from the ftp install. I did the ftp install of Suse last weekend but installed mono tonight.
I followed the tutorial at GotMono.com to install mono, monoDevelop, apache, etc. I must say the Suse Yast and the Ximian Red Carpet are both very smooth software management systems.  The ASP.NET test pages are working so now I just have to install mojoPortal.   The tutorial was very easy to follow.

You may have noticed I never posted the follow up to my previous post but I promise to test SlickUpload this weekend on mono 1.0.5 on my new Suse 9.1 test machine.

I'm also in the process of setting up some test machines using Virtual PC 2004 but the one I setup tonight is a real one.

Chris Hynes just posted a new release of SlickUpload. Hopefully it will work in mono, I'm going to test it for him this weekend since I'm already using it in mojoPortal. So far it only works with Windows installations of mojoPortal and I must admit I'm dubious that the new version will work in mono not because of any problem in SlickUpload but I'm dubious of mono not behaving the same as .NET on Windows. From my last investigation I already know they don't implement the HttpWorkerRequest.GetPreLoadedEntityBody or I should say in the responses I got from the mailing list they call returning null an implementation but under IIS the sub classes of HttpWorkerRequest do in fact return the portion of the request that is already loaded. The .NET documentation confirms that the super class does in fact return null but to me that just means its up to the sub class to implement it. One person on the list also pointed out that Cassini web server returns null here but I think thats too low a bar. The mono/apache platform needs to compete with Windows/IIS.

Anyway the reason I fear it won't work is I already tried checking for the null on the GetPreLoadedEntityBody call and calling .ReadEntityBody() if null is returned and it didn't work and the .NET documentation says the super class HttpWorkerRequest returns 0 when you call ReadEntityBody() so I'm speculating that mono will return 0  from the ReadEntityBody() method and call it an implementation even though on Windows/IIS the sub classes implement these methods much more usefully.

I will be so pleased if I'm wrong and not entirely surprised but a little, stay tuned to find out.

As promised, a new release is available on the download page with major improvements. Its the best release so far.