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

[Moore, Paul]

Thanks for the thoughts

Finally got gtk# running on windows - a challenging and exciting process
:-(

Its doing a Swing thing - ie not using the OS widgets, it's drawing them
by hand. For me this rules it out. Why, because the widgets will never
behave just like the windows ones. Looking almost exactly like isnt
enough.

I'm pinning my hopes on #wt


-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Pryor [mailto:jonpryor at vt.edu] 
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 3:21 PM
To: Moore, Paul
Cc: Mono Development List
Subject: Re: [Mono-devel-list] advice on portable UI coding


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
>