[Mono-devel-list] advice on portable UI coding

[Jonathan Pryor]

Which version of Windows? :-)

Gtk# has a GUI Designer (sort of), through Glade.  There are several
samples of using Glade from Gtk#.  Simplifying, you draw your GUI with
glade, save it to a .glade file, then load the .glade file at runtime to
generate the interface.  Rather nice.

On Windows, GTK+ looks native...as long as you're running Windows XP,
hence the "version of Windows" question.  There's a theme that creates
the Windows-native look, but it requires the theme engine that XP
introduced.  It's included by default with Gtk#, IIRC.

As for SWF on GTK+, I haven't seen much activity with it, so I would
concur that it's currently halted.

I am also unaware of a GUI Designer for #WT, but I'm sure one will be
eventually written as #Develop approaches 1.0.  I'm not sure what
timeframe that is, though.

Which leaves Gtk# and SWF as your current solutions.  I'd suggest Gtk#,
but I may be biased...

 - Jon

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 16:41, Moore, Paul wrote:
> What would people recommend for writing portable UI intensive code? 
>  
> Targets are Windows, Linux (GTK and or Motif)
> I would really like to be able to use a good GUI designer (rather than
> layout by hand).
> I would prefer not to have to install too much stuff on the client
> systems (is GTK# a big extra - I have no experience to be able to get
> a feel for it)
> I want my app to feel native (i.e  SWT model is preffered over Swing
> model)
>  
> I can see the following choices
>  
> SWF. Use vs.net to build on windows. It should just run on Linux with
> no recomp. Run using Wine on Linux 
> SWF. Use vs.net to build on windows. Run on linux using GTK version of
> SWF (it seems that this effort has been stopped - am  I right?)
> GTK#. Is there a GUI builder for it? Does it produce native look and
> feel on windows?
> #wt. Is there a GUI builder for it? I cant see a GTK port nor  Motif
> port.
> #ifdef. Using GTK# on Linux and SWF on windows. It seems like they are
> quite source compatible - but are they for non trivial apps?
> (dotgnu SWF libs are like swing so I count them out)
>  
> Any help or experience (negative or positive) greatly appreciated.
>  
>  
> Paul Moore
> Computer Associates
> Principal Software Engineer - BrightStor
> tel: + 1 425 825 2679
> fax: + 1 425 825 2761
> paul.moore06 at ca.com
>