Re: [Pnet-developers] Rhys' TODO list

[Rhys Weatherley]

Now I'll answer the other technical questions, for the benefit of people 
(other than Michael) who wish to tackle these tasks.

On Wednesday 06 August 2003 06:36 pm, James Michael DuPont wrote:
> >     - binary serialization
>
> This is what I am interested in alot,
> do you think that it is completly crazy to define a dotgnu binary
> format? Do you want to be compatible with microsoft?
> What about emitting IL bytecode representations of code to create the
> objects and sending that?

The goal is to be compatible with Microsoft, for drop-in API and protocol 
compatibility.  The relevant namespace is:

    System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary

I've been working on this myself the last few days, based on the format 
specification put together by the Mono community:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg05808.html

The task here would be to expand and complete the implementation.

If you wish to create your own serialization format for DotGNU, then you 
should do so outside of pnetlib in a separate assembly.  But it is not of any 
immediate use in meeting the DotGNU 0.1 deliverable (see previous message 
about delivering things of no use to me).

It would be interesting to have serializers capable of XMLRPC and Java Object 
Serialization that integrate with the existing System.Runtime.Serialization 
classes, but that's a separate problem from the one I need solved right now.

> >     - SOAP serialization
>
> I have been working with gsoap, a c++ component. There are some good
> lessons we can learn about soap from them. It seems that the mono soap
> serializer is well progressed. When I asked on #mono if they that there
> are any know system dependant code, they did not say there would be any
> problems porting that.

Right now, we are using some of the Mono SOAP code via ml-pnet, but I would 
like to have our own implementation, better integrated with pnetlib itself 
and made profile-aware.  There is also quite a bit of infrastructure work to 
implement (grep for TODO under pnetlib/runtime/System/Runtime).

> >     - finish CodeDom and write a test suite
>[...]
> I have some ideas about how this replacment might look, in fact, my
> working model is much more fine tuned, and would allow code on the
> finiest expression level to be created.

*sigh* Another thing that is not compatible.  I need people to build 
compatible API infrastructure pieces Michael.  That's the main goal of pnet: 
compatiblity with MS infrastructure.  Other parts of DotGNU may look into 
other alternatives.

Cheers,

Rhys.