[Mono-devel-list] GUI Toolkits

[Thomas Harning Jr.]

Ok, I'm looking to develop some applications that I'd like to run on as many platforms as possible, in particular Windows and Linux.  I don't care about Mac so much and don't really care if it's Mono or MS.Net on Windows.

I like Gtk# and particularly Glade.  I would definitely use that, however... my experience with MonoDevelop's use of Gtk# makes me wonder how stable it is.
I've often run into Null Reference exceptions related to Gtk# killing the application.  I would never want to release an application that did this, especially if it's to windows users who wouldn't have a clue as to how to debug it let alone feel like sending a bug report.  [+ it's jus not right to send buggy apps]

I've looked at SWT with a few little examples and it seems to work pretty good in Mono.  However I'm certain there's many missing things that would be useful and I've also discovered that the "Notification Icon" thing doesn't work [I dropped one in on a windows form in windows, ran it, it showed the icon.. in Linux, it didn't show  up in the tray (I have GAIM in the tray jus to verify that the tray is actually there).]

I've seen wx.Net ... not sure I like its setup.. haven't looked at it much... but I'd be interested in trying it out if it doesn't do the Null Reference exceptions that Gtk# seems to like doing.


About Gtk#... is there anything that I can do to prevent this exceptions?  I'm not sure what MonoDevelop's doing in the background and the UI code looks split throughout... so I wouldn't know where to look for problems (besides the fact that crashes seem extremely non-deterministic).
I've seen with sending delegates that you have to keep an instance in managed code if you're going to send it off to unmanaged realm as a function pointer [ex: for Tao.FreeGlut], which is a minor pain... but will certainly be worth it if I can use Gtk# in my apps.

Thanks in advance to any who reply... oh, and I have looked at Mono's wiki page for Toolkits, which is how I found out about wx.Net
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Thomas Harning Jr.