[Mono-list] Implementing System.Windows.Forms

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> It seems to me that there are two ways to do this:
> 1) provide full compatibility: implying some Wine-like emulation of
> windows messages.

The approach we have been advocating in the past few weeks after the big
debate on Windows.Forms, is to use the Wine Library to implement
Windows.Forms.  WineLib is a library version of the Win32 API that runs
on top of X11, and should provide all the interesting pieces already
done for us.

I have updated the web pages on the CVS server, but I have not "pushed"
an update to the web, as I am waiting for a couple of confirmations
before I do so. 

It is sad that we wont get to use Gtk or Qt as the implementation
back-ends, and that we will loose some UI consistency [1], but it is the
only way to implement it.

The good news is that people with access to Windows, and with Win32
experience can start *today* working on the various classes on the
Windows.Forms namespace and test it today with the real Windows system.

Then, we can just use WineLib on Linux [2] to run the toolkit at that
point. 

[1] The UI consistency can later be achieved by extending Wine to use
the Gtk or Qt theme rendering engines, hence making Wine look like your
native desktop.

[2] There are some tricky bits about linking with WineLib, but we
believe we have sorted some of those out.  In general just think `it
will be fixed for me when the time comes'.

 (and that various people have been working towards) 

Miguel