Linux.Conf.Au this year introduced the FIXITs which were BOF (Birds Of a Feather) sessions with a purpose, e.g. to produce a list of critical bugs in a piece of software. The first one I went to was the DotGNU FIXIT. Mainly because I wanted to get a feel for where the project was at, and what was happening with it.

Essentially the runtime engine and C# compile for DotGNU are basically done. The core class libraries are also basically done, but System.XML is a bit of a mess. DotGNU is portable to a number of different architectures. They've also started working on the Windows.Forms library which isn't really as Win32 dependent as everyone thinks. They've worked around this by making primitive drawing and window operations part of the toolkit then building the rest on top. This means the basic WinForms stuff is very portable and in good shape.

Most of the difficulties people raised with DotGNU were difficulties installing the software, and that its hard to get a feel for exactly what will and won't work by looking at the web site. The web site needs a reasonable amount of work.