[Mono-list] Windows Forms...wah

[Tum]

Hi everyone,

Here are some of my thoughts on the state of GUIs and Windows Forms.

+
Windows Forms has very nice native controls.  It is fast, responsive but
VERY POORLY designed.  It is only a thin layer about native windows
controls.  Using native controls is *ok*, but they could have at least
used the model-view-controller design pattern. The first thing I did
when I started using Windows Forms was to write model/controller classes
for lists and trees.

+
Swing is wonderfully designed.  It is the best and most pure OO UI class
library out there.  It used to have major speed problems, but that
hasn't been too much of an issue lately.

+
I really think that instead of porting Windows.Forms (which would be
VERY hard), we should be thinking more along the lines of creating
something similar to Swing or SWT.  A swing like implementation would be
better as you would have more control over component drawing (and thus
better support printing and UI capturing).  A designer plugin for VS.NET
can easily be written to support the new toolkit.  I think the added
bonus of being able to *reliably* port .NET GUI applications to .NET
would encourage people to use the new toolkit over Windows.Forms.

+
If a swing-like toolkit was written, only a few native routines would be
needed.  Drawing/blting (System.Drawing?), window creation and
message/event dispatching.  This would be trivial to implement on
Windows and Linux.  Most of the UI could then be written in portable
managed code :D.

::Tum