[Mono-devel-list] DotGNU competition??

[Neil Cawse]

>DotGNU is having a collaborative competition to implement
Windows.Forms.
>http://www.gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/competition.html
>
>Will this benefit Mono?
>
>Brian Takita

Im working on System.Windows.Forms for the dotgnu project.

We have a great portable model - a plug in(toolkit) for each type of
graphics environment, one already built for win32 and one for xlib.

These toolkits can be created for any environment very easily.

We implement all the control functionality and drawing ourselves because
we have a fairly comprehensive System.Drawing.Graphics.

My web page with some screenshots:
http://pnet.homelinux.org

One of the criticisms leveled against our path is that it doesn't take
on the look of the platform. It would be very easy for us to allow
supporting of native controls as well as our drawn ones. The other
criticism is speed - I am convinced that once we are done, this will be
very close to native speed. 

Our project is making great progress and the competition will also help.

There is and will be even more duplicate effort in the two approaches.
While the rendering of the controls is different, much of the underlying
behavior is common.

It would be *very* simple for us to expose the underlying win32 hwnd so
you could reuse all the controls you have done now but have the
advantage of all the other work/controls/System.Drawing that we have
done. We would need to implement some small changes into our
System.Drawing.Win32 plug in to support loading winelib.

That's one option but there is definitely work that we have done that
you could simply copy and paste into your SWF - like Graphics.Regions
but obviously it would make sense to be smart about things - I wouldn't
mind figuring out how best we could make use of your work (and you of
ours).

I don't speak for DotGNU, just as an individual.

Neil.