It’s been a long time since I’ve been officially active on P2PChat, but there’s been something coming. And now I’ve finally released the new P2PChat website, considering my designing skills it very beautiful, the sad part is that it properly says more about my designing skills, than the new website. As of this moment the website almost empty, but there will be new screenshots and download links as soon as release 1.0 is done.

I’ve also just committed the a complete rewrite of libP2PChat, the library behind P2PChat. The new implementation is actually my third rewrite, the others were never released and was never finished. Currently it’s only committed to the SVN repository and it haven’t been tested yet. So there’s properly a few bugs to fix before final release. I’m also doing a complete rewrite of the frontend, becuase the new backed isn’t backwards compatible; and I’ve discovered that the auto-opacity feature makes P2PChat crash on most systems. I’ve heard that Mono have native opacity through a compositing engine, perhaps the linux client could have some opacity feature. But I’m sad to say that I don’t think my WM can run the opacity effects.

Anyway, the new backend (libP2PChat) is going to rock. Because this time I’ve more or less removed the limitations. I’ve done that by allow different message types, and all messages are handled by a protocol extension. Making both the library and frontend implementation much more flexible.

“Open Source Development with CVS” is a book from cvsbook.red-bean.com released under GNU GPL. I’ve been reading most of the CVS related capters, and it’s certainly a good start if you wish to use CVS. It’s a long book, and it takes you far beyond basic CVS commands. But it was also a good book, and for a person who has never used CVS before it was a good start. I can recommand it to anyone who wants to learn CVS, but you might want to skip a few capters, there’s a lot about develpment communities, which is not necessary to know if you just want to learn CVS. I feel a bit more confident using CVS for the next changes to P2PChat.

Today Sharpdevelop 2.0 has finally been released. Sharpdevelop is an open source IDE for .Net framework. I’ve been using Sharpdevelop 1.x to write P2PChat, and I’m planing to make a short switch back to Windows, just to complete P2PChat and libP2PChat. Then I’ll move back onto whatever *nix is closest, and offers me enough Mono support to write a Linux/Mono/GTK# version of P2PChat, on top of the old libP2PChat I’ll develop in Windows.

I tried to install Sharpdevelop 2.0, amazing that my dualboot Windows still works it been at least 3 month since I’ve visited it last, anyway I played a little with .Net 2.0 and it seams like it might offer some new features. I wonder where P2PChat will end once I get started