[Mono-dev] GSoc efforts questions...

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 9:36 PM, buhochileno at gmail.com
<buhochileno at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi to all:
>
> Is not my intention to make a ugly discussion about this, but I know
> that some efforts are made in Gsoc to help mono in different and
> important things and I wonder about the feature of some of them,
> specially 2:
>
> - Mono-Windows-Forms Designer (MWF-Designer), different pools some time
> ago show that this is a important thing to allow to a lot of programmer
> to migrate to mono/linux, is this effort have a future?, or be wasted?

MWF brings applications to Linux, and enables many users to migrate to
Linux, and hence it is very important to be able to *run* Winforms
apps on Mono. However, Winforms is not the recommended GUI toolkit for
new development on Mono -- we instead offer a GTK# designer, which is
stable and usable.

Developers writing applications today with Winforms are already using
Visual Studio, so a MWF designer does not offer them anything new. Do
not underestimate the amount of resources that would be needed to make
it fully stable and complete. Rather than diluting our resources, I
think it's best to improve the GTK# designer. We also have the
Moonlight designer, where were are offering something unique on the
Linux platform, and which is much more interesting for new users.

Of course, contributions are welcome, if you feel that this is an
important area. I still think that it would be interesting to *see*
the MWF designer in MonoDevelop, though there were a couple of
problems last time that was tried. On the whole, I suspect that it's
been useful in testing the stability and completeness of MWF too; I
doubt it's been wasted effort. Some of the low-level designer and
ComponentModel infrastucture may also be useful for the ASP.NET
designer.

> - GStreamer# (http://abock.org/tag/gstreamer/), this is the second
> effort for a wrapper for this media library, as far as I know the main
> things are kind of ready (sure lot of test and bug fix are needed but
> that is true for lot of mono aspects..), this have a future?, is death?

GStreamer# is important, yes. It's the most likely candidate for a
Mono media stack, but there hasn't been much real demand for such a
thing (or interest in working on it) so far. If someone integrates
GStreamer into Moonlight, I guess we may see renewed interest here.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com