[Mono-list] Long shot!

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> I'm not an expert on Mono but I did see Miguel's presentation in Zürich a
> month or so ago. From that presentation and what I have read online, I would
> feel confident planning to have WinForms basically useable in 2 years.

I would actually be a lot more aggressive than that.

For instance, take the System.Web and System.Data classes in Mono, they
are roughly a 100,000 lines of code, and a solid 70% of those has been
written by a relatively small team of eight developers.

These developers achieved that under some pretty extreme conditions:
from being unable to compile their code, to use a "compilation service"
system that was setup so people could submit code over the web and
compile it to fight every one of the early bugs in the mono runtime and
the mono C# compilers.  

It is pretty amazing that these effort got so far in so little time. 
The Windows.Forms team lead by Dennis is now gaining momentum, and after
the false start we had with the Gtk-based backend, we are now on track. 
I would say that we could have a working and usable Windows.Forms
implementation in less than six months if we can get enough people
working.

One of the beauties of Windows.Forms is that it is highly
compartmentalized: people can work in parallel in different parts of the
class libraries today, and test the pieces independently and later put
them together, even more than we did with the core class libraries.  

Miguel