Two to Three waltzing in Vienna

Two weeks ago, we released Gtk# 2.99.1, the second beta release of C# bindings for GTK+ 3.x. The first beta release was almost a year ago, so there's quite a lot of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. There's also a significant amount of API changes since 2.99.0, with two types of motivations:

• Provide better typing, in particular for lists. For example, the Group property in Gtk.RadioButton is now a RadioButton[] array, instead of a non-descript GLib.List.
• Get closer to .NET idioms and conventions, like adding an I* to all interfaces.

You can read more about all these improvements in the release notes.

A big motivation to get that release out the door was the .NET + GNOME Hackfest, which we kicked off today in Vienna. Of the dozen of hackers present, a lot of them are working on porting C# apps to GTK+ 3.x: SparkleShare, Tomboy, Pinta, Smuxi, etc.

Of course, we couldn't let them get ahead of Banshee, so Andrés and me took the opportunity to release today Banshee 2.9.0. It is the first release using GTK+ 3.x, and depends on Gtk# 2.99.1. As such, it is a development release, and it has a few known issues, in particular some visual glitches. But it has come a long way since we started the porting effort, and I'm looking forward to the benefits we will get from using a more modern toolkit.

I'm happy to be able to attend this hackfest, so I'm grateful to our sponsors that made this possible:

Collabora Ltd, Open Source Consulting

Norkart AS, Norway's premier supplier of Geographic Information Systems and related consulting

Hotel Schottenpoint, our hotel partner

Novacoast IT, Professional Services and Product Development

The GNOME Foundation, providers of the GNOME desktop

The University of Vienna and the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry, our venue sponsors