Dwindling Interest in CocoaSharp

For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been using CocoaSharp to develop some tutorials on how to show other C# WinForm engineers how to create graphical applications on the Mac. As I develop said tutorials, it is with ultimate certainty that I will find a function missing from the current CocoaSharp implementation. Well, this shit is open source so I add the damn function and keep moving. After a while, I’ve made about 15 modifications that would be absolutely for others to effectively use this software library in a commercial setting.So, I email the CocoaSharp mailing list and ask for the procedure for submitting enhancments. Holy shit did that start a narled flurry of responses. Apparently, this is a touchy subject. It seems that there really isn’t any official procedure that can quickly get the changes in. It was told that a ‘month or two’ is about average.At the moment, I’ve followed all the suggested directions…..and now I wait. If these ‘extremely’ trivial and obvious enhancements don’t get excepted in less than 5 days….you can forget it. That is a GIANT red flag…that this project is slowly dying.And so, I wait…..In the meantime, I’ve also been learning a ton about Objective-C and Cocoa. I’ve also been really trying to ‘accept’ Xcode as the my IDE (Integrated Developement Environment) as well. Current impressions:

Item	Grade
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET	A
Microsoft C# Programming Language	A
Objective-C 1.X Programming Language	C-
Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language	?
C++ Programming Language	B

From what I’ve read, Apple will be making some crazy awesome changes to Objective-C to finally start modernizing the 1983 language. Unfortunately, there currently advertized enhancements will only get them to the late 90’s. The addition of garbage collection is by far the most important update. Properties are nice and will only add to the productive when compared to the effort of writing software in the 1.x version. However, it still lacks the simplest of constructs (i.e namespace) and a cannot-live-without construct (i.e. generics). However, it this is truely the only language that Apple is supporting on their platform….what are ya gonna do. I’m slowly warming up to it….