[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.2.8 and pnetlib 0.1.2 released

[Rhys Weatherley]

Portable.NET 0.2.8 and pnetlib 0.1.2 have been released:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.2.8.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.1.2.tar.gz

The major changes in this release are to the C# system library and the
code in "pnet" that depends upon it.  I'm now turning my attention back
to the C# compiler.

Other changes are detailed in the appended NEWS entries.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.2.8 (7 January 2002)

Runtime engine:

* Updates to the internalcall methods to match changes to pnetlib.
* Implement the reflection API's.
* Implement array cloning properly in "Object.MemberwiseClone".
* Method invocation via reflection to support unit testing in pnetlib.
* Fix the status handling for "Main": it used to think that an
  exception was thrown sometimes when it wasn't.
* The range for exception blocks was incorrect in the bytecode verifier.

* Throw a "missing method" exception when the verifier fails.

C# Compiler:

* Fix a shift/reduce conflict in the grammar which caused it to
  complain about casts to array types.
* Insert the "%split" keyword into the treecc definitions where
  large operations may otherwise cause gcc 3.0 to crash.

Documentation:

* Parse and format excluded base types in the ECMA specification.
* Implement "csdocvalil", to validate pnetlib against the ECMA spec.
  Output formats are text and XML.

Other:

* Terminology changes in the README to make it FSF-compatible.
* Implement the MD5 and SHA1 hash algorithms.
* Modify GUID generation to redistribute entropy using SHA1.
* Turn off HAVE_CONFIG_H prior to including readline headers,
  to prevent confusion.
* Configuration updates to detect the thread model similarly to libgc.
* Alter the ChangeLog format to make it Emacs-friendly.
* Move assignment-compatibility testing into "image".
* Some more 32-bit vs 64-bit fixes.

pnetlib 0.1.2 (7 January 2001)

* File handle operations in "Platform".
* A new system for handling default messages in exception classes.
* "System.IO.*", "System.Guid", "System.Version", "System.Resources.*",
  "System.Reflection.Emit.*", "System.Collections.*",
"System.Security.*".
* Change the resource system to use the "_(tag)" convention.
* Heavy modifications to the reflection interface.
* Use "#if !ECMA_COMPAT" to mark definitions that are not compatible
  with the ECMA specification.
* Implement the "csunit" program, which is the beginnings of a unit
  test framework for pnetlib.
* Fill in many of the missing gaps in the "System" namespace.
* Implement unicast and multicast delegates.
* Update the documentation for the native method interface, and
fine-tune
  the pnetlib source code as we do so.
* General improvements for ECMA compatibility.
* Date and calendar functions.
* More culture-related classes in "System.Globalization.*".
* Move "internal" classes to "System.Private" to avoid pollution of
  the standardised parts of the library.
* Mark up the source tree with "TODO" attributes to assist with the
  generation of class status information.
* Added the "HACKING" file to describe how people can contribute.