Main Page DBusSharp

From NDesk

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
Revision as of 20:38, 29 December 2006 (edit)
Alp (Talk | contribs)

← Previous diff		 Revision as of 20:38, 29 December 2006 (edit) (undo)
Alp (Talk | contribs)

Next diff →
Line 97: Line 97:
* The DType enumeration will soon become internal although it is not changed in this release. Please remove use of this enum in your code or make your own copy. Keep in mind that's there's no sensible reason for applications to use DType or something similar because other message parsing machinery in managed D-Bus is not public, and that D-Bus has a recursive type system, so the enum should have been called DToken or similar anyway. * The DType enumeration will soon become internal although it is not changed in this release. Please remove use of this enum in your code or make your own copy. Keep in mind that's there's no sensible reason for applications to use DType or something similar because other message parsing machinery in managed D-Bus is not public, and that D-Bus has a recursive type system, so the enum should have been called DToken or similar anyway.
-* Remember to run your application with DBUS_VERBOSE=1 when testing. Some of the warnings may indicate serious bugs in your interfaces, particularly the "expected signature mismatch" warning. Some of these warnings will become hard exceptions in future releases, while others are harmless. If in doubt, ask on the IRC channel.+* Remember to run your application with DBUS_VERBOSE=1 when testing. Some of the warnings may indicate serious bugs in your interfaces, particularly the "expected signature mismatch" warning. Some of these warnings will become hard exceptions in future releases, while others are usually harmless (such as the missing handler warnings). If in doubt, ask on the IRC channel.
==== 0.3 ==== ==== 0.3 ====

Revision as of 20:38, 29 December 2006

dbus-sharp is a C# implementation of D-Bus. It's often referred to as "managed D-Bus" to avoid confusion with existing bindings (which wrap libdbus).

D-Bus is an inter-process communication framework that lets applications interface with the system event bus as well as allowing them to talk to one another in a peer-to-peer configuration.

Contents

Status

This software is under development but is already used by a wide range of applications for tasks as simple as maintaining a single instance of the GUI to whole instant messaging frameworks and hardware detection APIs.

It provides a tested, high-performance bridge to and from all systems that are exposed via D-Bus, regardless of programming language, UI toolkit or license. The source code is MIT X11 licensed (Free Software/Open Source), allowing integration into other projects with very few restrictions.

The code is a clean-room implementation based on the D-Bus Specification Version 0.11 and study of the wire protocol of existing tools.

It aims for compatibility with Mono and Microsoft .NET frameworks supporting the 2.0 profile. Backward compatibility with 1.0 will not be a consideration. Ongoing work to ensure CLS compliance means that managed D-Bus can be used by any language that can target the CLR.

Cross platform support

Supported platforms

A standard build of managed D-Bus will work across a wide range of platforms:

  • x86
  • 64-bit (eg. AMD64)
  • Big endian (eg. PPC)
  • ARM (eg. Nokia 770)
  • Mono 1.1.13 or newer
  • GNU/Linux
  • FreeBSD
  • Mac OS X
  • Microsoft Windows / .NET runtime (currently limited to peer-to-peer connections)

Soon to be supported

Users

A few projects bundle the source code for managed D-Bus with their applications. This kind of arrangement can work if you're on good terms with someone who can maintain dbus-sharp, but ideally you should depend on stable releases.

Contact

Support can be found on the #managed-dbus IRC channel on irc.gnome.org

There is no mailing list or email contact address.

Packaging and API stability

Packagers are advised not to install this library in the user's GAC (Global Assembly Cache). This is because, while the high-level object mapping API is fairly stable, much of the low-level API is likely to change between releases.

This isn't an ideal arrangement, but as long as applications stick to the high-level API and avoid classes like MessageReader/MessageWriter and obscure methods on Connection, and don't attempt to use or write custom Transports, there shouldn't be an issue.

This advice may change as the API stabilises, if the low-level and high-level API are split into their own assemblies, or if the low-level API is made internal.

Download

See the managed D-Bus release archive.

0.3.1

FreeBSD support introduced in 0.3 broke 64-bit Linux. This point-release provides a fix.

It also provides minor cleanups and the ability to parse more complex object trees as variants.

Notes to integrators:

  • The DType enumeration will soon become internal although it is not changed in this release. Please remove use of this enum in your code or make your own copy. Keep in mind that's there's no sensible reason for applications to use DType or something similar because other message parsing machinery in managed D-Bus is not public, and that D-Bus has a recursive type system, so the enum should have been called DToken or similar anyway.
  • Remember to run your application with DBUS_VERBOSE=1 when testing. Some of the warnings may indicate serious bugs in your interfaces, particularly the "expected signature mismatch" warning. Some of these warnings will become hard exceptions in future releases, while others are usually harmless (such as the missing handler warnings). If in doubt, ask on the IRC channel.

0.3

Official release notes

Notes to integrators:

  • API change: The NameReply enum is now RequestNameReply
  • New files: UnixTransport.cs, SocketTransport.cs should be included when bundling the code
  • As always, UnixMonoTransport.cs and IntrospectionSchemas.cs should not be included unless you have specific needs
  • If you use dbus-sharp-glib, you must upgrade to the latest release
  • the -unsafe gmcs/csc compiler flag has been required since 0.2

0.2

Support was added for reading non-native endian messages. ObjectPaths and Signatures were made more robust and several exception messages were improved. A complete list of changes is available in the version control system. There have been no changes in the high-level or the low-level public API in this release. dbus-sharp-glib remains stable at version 0.1.

0.1

This is an emergency release to provide a working alternative for applications stuck with the unmaintained dbus-sharp binding for libdbus. The API/ABI may change in future releases, and it hasn't been audited for security, which means that it shouldn't be used to provide services to an untrusted audience over TCP. However, a number of applications are successfully using this code base already. Event handlers must be manually removed (foo.MyEvent -= HandleMyEvent;) to avoid flooding the daemon with match rules. MarshalByRefObject may not be supported in future releases, so you should stick to using interfaces to define dbus API. Exceptions are not consistently mapped but should work both in exported and imported API.

Development

See the development roadmap for a detailed list of remaining tasks.

git-clone git://git.ndesk.org/pub/scm/dbus-sharp

The dbus-sharp API is not stable. In particular, please don't check this into your cvs/svn repository or bundle it with your program. And don't even think about installing it in the user's GAC or packaging it for your distribution yet.

There is also a module which provides GLib integration as an optional extra:

git-clone git://git.ndesk.org/pub/scm/dbus-sharp-glib

Retrieved from "http://ndesk.org/DBusSharp"