So I guess we’re ‘allowed’ to talk about the conference that Eric and I scheduled to attend to show off Meshwork. He’s the scuttle butt from the conference web site:

Seattle Mind Camp is a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, overnight Seattle confab. What happens when you put 150 of Seattle’s smartest geeks in an empty office building for 24 hours? We’re not sure either, but we’d like to find out. It’s time to meet and connect with those involved in the interesting projects going on in Seattle in a relaxed environment.

What: A weekend, 24-hour, multi-track event. Think huge space with breakout rooms, broadband Wi-Fi, projectors, white boards - and you.

Who: 150 of Seattle’s forward thinkers: techies, entrepreneurs, executives, gamers, musicians, and anyone else with a great idea.

When: Mind Camp will take place on November 5-6

Why?: You know all those hallway conversations that never get to flourish during a “normal” conference? Now they will.

If it sounds interesting hit the site to get more details and to sign up. Maybe if enough people show up it’ll be interesting.

Okay.. back to work on Meshwork.. well.. once windows finishes updating.. and rebooting… *snore*

Welp, I guess I only needed to get Meshwork’s UI ported over and I only needed to get it started at that. I cleaned up some code and committed everything just a bit ago. Meshwork is pretty slick, especially from the code side of it. It was fun working on it while I did.

Hrmm, what to work on now.

Chris says he’s got inheritence graphing in GTK# for MonoDevelop for me if I want it. We’ll see.

I really need to think things out a little more. Last night I’m working on Meshwork and doing the mouse eventhandlers for the networkmap in windows and the code looked something like this:


private static FileFind.Meshwork.MouseEventArgs SetMeshworkMouseButtons(System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs e)
{
FileFind.Meshwork.MouseEventArgs ee = new FileFind.Meshwork.MouseEventArgs();
if(e.Button == System.Windows.Forms.MouseButtons.Left)
{
ee.Button = System.Windows.Forms.MouseButtons.Left;
}
...
return ee;
}


And I get compile erros. Hrmm I wonder why. Instead of looking at that and thinking about it. I give sigh and tell Eric “Damn compile errors hooking up the mouseevents. ‘Can not convert System.Windows.Forms.MouseButton to FileFind.Meshwork.MouseButton are you missing a cast?’. WTF?”

Well, of course the answer is obvious. Sure it was 2 a.m. again. But.. damn Rev… engage brain!

(Note to self: Never give this site url to potential employers.)

“Completed” a port of the Meshwork control NetworkMap that is responsible or the very slick visual representation of the Meshwork network that your client connects to. Originally written in VB I ported it over to C# 2.0. This proved to be very wacky fun. (I’ll add NetworkMap screenshots when I get home.)

Some of the differences between VB and C# made for kind of a mess when, for instance, I used ^ in a chunk of code that calculated the size/position of the grouping ring for nodes sharing the same IP address at the router - at least I believe that’s where the ^ was. In C# it’s a bitwise operator. Oops.

Most of my issues were those of style that drove Eric a little nutty. Being largely self taught I’ve picked up rules of thumb here and there but nothing that’s unified in one golden rule book of style. I just do what works for me.

In order to preserve Eric’s sanity and make my code bit more Pro - Hey, I work on enterprise apps already! =P - I’m going to do my best to stick with the Mono Coding Guidelines. While I don’t totally agree with all the points made, we might as well keep the code base consistent.

So now I’m back to the windows UI and trying to solve my connection issue. But, it’s coming along. Once it’s ready for testing I’ll want to setup a Click Once site and update the app from there. I need to look more into the security and privilages because at the moment I can’t get it to install from a system on the internet because it’s absolutely untrusted. I need to figure out what I need to do there. And then I might look at creating a tool to generate Click Once packages since MSs tool will only show up in VStudio Pro and above. Fortunately it’s all built into .Net 2.0.

If you have .Net 2.0 installed and Internet Exploder you can give it a click and see it refuse to install - for what it’s worth. This is running on a debian based box with Apache. So, like the docs say, the host doesn’t matter.

UPDATE:

Here’s a screen of the network map. The gradients on the node backgrounds are screwed up. And I’ve got a LOT more work to do on the client proper. But I’m getting there.

So, I guess I can go ahead and babble about the project I’m working on now, I just can’t tell you where the source or the binaries are - we aren’t doing an open beta yet.

Meshwork is an encrypted p2p application for doing IRC style chat, instant messaging, message boarding, and file transfers.

A pretty simple sentence, for an elaborate application. The core is written in C# and - thanks to Mono - is entirely cross platform. My job at the moment is to write/port the windows specific UI to C# .Net 2.0. Even though Mono is about 98% complete with the System.Windows.Forms implimentation we’re going to go with each OS having it’s own native UI.

Theare are currenlyt just two developers. Eric has done pretty much all of the work and I’m coming in to take the load off and remove the need for him to run a windows box. =)

I’ll update later with screen shots and my thoughts on C# Express Beta 2 and .Net 2.0.