[Mono-devel-list] OpenGL and Tao?

[Thomas Harning Jr.]

Mongoose wrote:
> I've tried to contact Randy Ridge about Tao, and all
> his domains and email are now dead.  Is Tao no longer
> developed?  
> 
> I'm also wondering if anyone in mono is working on a
> standard OpenGL wrapper API.  I can't seem to get any
> information about OpenGL development with mono. 
> Currently I'm using opengl-sharp a binding mostly for
> Gtk# and glarea.

I've worked with Tao and OpenGL, along with Cg.
I've used it in my CSE projects for a graphics class which mostly used C, but I decided to take the unbeaten path and try it in C#.  Mono works great with Tao and is very cross-platform if you use FreeGlut.  I'd assume Gtk# and glarea would work fine cross-platform as well.

Building Tao in mono is a pain however, as NAnt likes to die when a warning occurs [why???????]... so... even simple things like unused public variables kill things.
I've been using the Tao libraries that were built for windows and have had no trouble [I shouldn't really have any trouble.. perhaps except for calling conventions that OpenGL has in windows... I think..]

If you need the Tao libraries, I can toss you my archive including the compiled versions.

One thing you might wanna be careful about is making sure to keep a reference to your delegates used in events... Mono likes to get rid of those at whim, so it seems.... though when throwing a delegate into unmanaged realm, the delegate no longer really has a reference if you just allocate the delegate within the function call. [also, the "magic" that mono's C# compiler does for automatic delegate construction is not useable if you try to compile on Visual Studio... though hopefully this is put in Visual Studio 2k5.
Ex:   Event += Function instead of Event += new EventHandler(Function);... it's so much simpler for the automatic setup.]

-- 
Thomas Harning Jr.