[Vala] Vala & concerned issues !!

[Emad Al-Bloushi <al3omdah live com>]

Peace be upon you all,

I'm new to Vala programming language and I have well experience in Java & PHP programming languages using OOP 
, honestly I'm little bit concerned about list of issues I hope you can help me to reach the right direction 
as listed below :

    1) How can I list installed packages to compile my code "pango , cairo , gtk+-2.0 ..etc" and where are 
they installed (I'm using ubuntu 9.10) ?
    2) I have never developed applications with programming languages that use pointers !! so in Vala where 
to start to understand pointers and to keep my applications safe from memory leaks ?
    3) Using pointers in Vala is it a must ?
    4) Where should I start to know more about using binding libraries ?
    5) What version of unicode does Vala support ?  
    6) owned, unowned, and weak modifiers I do not know how can I use them & why ?

finally , I have developed a simple snippet to demonstrate how to use Google AJAX API in Vala but I did not 
use any thread in my code so I'm forced to use "--thread" to run my code perfectly I do not know why ?

You can find my snippet here http://code.valaide.org/content/using-google-ajax-language-api

OS              : Ubuntu 9.10
Vala version : 0.7.8
    
Best regards,

Emad Al-Bloushi                                           
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live: Make it easier for your friends to see what you’re up to on Facebook.
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/windows/windowslive/see-it-in-action/social-network-basics.aspx?ocid=PID23461::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-xm:SI_SB_2:092009