[DotGNU]Portable.NET status 12 April 2002

[Rhys Weatherley]

I've been primarily working on documentation and debug
support within the engine this week.

The CVM instruction set has been documented and is
now available at the following URL thanks to some
Python magic from Gopal:

http://www.southern-storm.com.au/doc/cvm/index.html

Debug line number support has been added to the engine.
When an exception is thrown, "e.ToString()" will return
a complete stack trace, including source line numbers if
they are available.  The "samples/except.exe" program
shows what happens when an exception is thrown.

There has also been some tweaks to the debugger, ildb.
It can't debug anything just yet, but I'm getting ready
to activate it sometime in the next couple of months.
The ildb help system now works at least, so Stephen
can stop making fun of me in his .sig. :-)

I've updated "libgc" in the CVS sources to 6.1alpha4.
Hopefully this will fix some issues with libgc on some
platforms.  I'm still trying to figure out how to update
"libffi", since the version in gcc's source tree is not
easily extractable.  Any help would be appreciated.

There were a few other tweaks to simplify the interpreter
and coder now that the new method cache is in place.

On the pnetlib side, Peter is continuing development
of System.Net and System.Xml; Stephen has fixed
some of the Uri.cs problems; Gopal has been working
on HttpWebRequest.cs; and I made some tweaks to
support exception stack traces.

The "SocketMethods" class has been moved into the
"mscorlib" assembly in the "Platform" namespace.  Now
waiting for someone to contribute the C code for the
engine, and we should have socket support soon.

Next week, I'm going to tackle string resources in the
engine, and attributes in the C# compiler.

Cheers,

Rhys.