[Mono-devel-list] Windows.Forms schemes.

[Neil Cawse]

This has been flogged but my comments..

>A) write portable GUI code
>B) painlessley if possible (ie a GUI designer)
>C) that uses (not looks like) the native widgets

Reasonable requirements and ones that I think most developers will have.

There is still quite a bit of work to be done to get to that point. If
one of the SWF implementations can get solid enough, you would be able
to use sharpdevelop (free) or visual studio (not so free) as gui
designer. All code would be fully portable.

Many apps these days don't use the native controls. They are difficult
to inherit from and extend in oo environments. SWT is following this
path but there is a least common denominator issue - and its tricky.
Although they have done a great job and this is also definitely a v.
good cross platform (and cross language) option (#WT).

In terms of dotgnu, its *very* easy for us to add support to allow
native controls on our implementation, but our focused - single minded
goal at the moment is to get swf working so we can run lots windows apps
on linux - same im sure for Mono guys.

I think the whole idea of copying an exe from a windows machine to a
linux one and running it and it just works is amazing. It works great
now for simple gui apps. That will change..