It's been quite a while since the last development snapshot. I'm still working on integrating .NET 2.0 features, but I'm also doing random fixes/improvements here and there as I come across them. The biggest visible change in this snapshot is the support for defining .NET properties as Java fields. The main motivation was that I wanted to handle the System.in/out/err fields more cleanly. They are now implemented like this:

@ikvm.lang.Property(get="get_in")
public final staticInputStream in;

static { in = null; }

private staticInputStream get_in()
{
    return StdIO.in;
}

This defines a .NET property called "in" and associates the getter method of the property with the get_in() method. Note that we're only specifying the getter here in the Property annotation because the field is final, but you can also specify a setter method. The static initializer that initializes the property to null is necessary to keep javac happy, but it doesn't actually do anything. The ikvm bytecode compiler will ignore any assignments to read-only properties. Another thing to note is that the get_in() will automatically be made public (because the field is public), but from Java it will still appear private.

Changes since previous development snapshot:

• Fixed regression in return value annotation value.
• Forked Class, Constructor and Field.
• Made class annotation handling lazy and bypass encode/decode.
• Fixed ReflectionOnly referenced assembly loading order (ikvmstub).
• Initialize class library in JVM_CreateJavaVM.
• Reintroduced guard against recursive FinishCore invocations.
• Implemented support for annotations on .NET fields/methods/parameters.
• Hide ikvmc generated GetEnumerator() method from Java.
• Simplified annotation handling.
• Added support to Class.forName() for assembly qualified Java type names.
• Replaced notion of DynamicOnly types with Fake types. Fake types are implemented as generic type instances and can have DynamicOnly methods.
• Changed System.nanoTime() implementation to use Stopwatch.GetTimestamp().
• Ripped out annotation/constant pool support that is no longer needed.
• Added support for defining unloadable (i.e. missing) types to use as custom modifiers in signatures.
• Use custom modifiers to make sure constructor signature is unique (if necessary).
• Restructured code to remove compiler warnings.
• Updated FlushFileBuffers p/invoke to use SafeFileHandle.
• Forked OpenJDK sources that are going to be modified to refactor the library initialization.
• Made __Fields nested class abstract (it was already sealed) and removed the constructor.
• Restored the special case for interface .cctor methods to fix bug #1930303
• Added ikvm/internal/MonoUtils.java. A new helper class to contain Mono specific methods.
• Added Mac OS X platform detection.
• Fixed System.mapLibraryName() to use platform detection instead of os.name property.
• Improved java.library.path for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
• Added support for setting os.name and os.ver on Mac OS X.
• Try to guess os.arch based on IntPtr.Size.
• Set sun.nio.MaxDirectMemorySize to -1 to allow "unlimited" direct byte buffers.
• Fixed memory mapped file bug that caused mapping at non-zero file position to fail.
• Close mapping handle using the Close() method on SafeFileHanlde instead of p/invoking the Win32 API directly.
• Added support for filenames/paths with colons in them to Win32FileSystem.CanonicalizePath().
• Added support for turning Java fields into .NET properties with an annotation.
• Implemented System.in/out/err as .NET properties (explicitly).

WARNING: THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT SNAPSHOT, NOT AN OFFICIAL RELEASE.

Development snapshots are intended for evaluating and keeping track of where the project is going, not for production usage. The binaries have not been extensively tested and are not strong named.

If you want to run this version on Mono, you'll need a Mono version built from recent svn, it does not work on Mono 1.9.

Binaries available here: ikvmbin-0.37.3026.zip