[Mono-list] Windows Forms...wah

[fssc]

When you talk about model/controller classes would implement a list box say
as two separate entities, one to display the data and another to store the
data? If so please don't, or at least give the option to go either your way
or as they have now. It's all very well bringing in comp sci ideas like this
but sometimes they just get in the way when you just want a list box that
displays, say the days of the week. The last thing one wants to to do if
spent time setting up the infrastruture just do some as simple as that. It's
sometimes much easier to have the 'model' part of the viewer, as it it in
most GUI libs, eg VB, VCL, Windows.Forms, and probably others. I tried once
to write a GUI app sing use swing and I was amazed at the amount of work one
had to do just to get the littlest things to work. After that expereince I
gave up and went back to more productive environments.

Be interested to learn what other people things.

Herbert

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tum" <tum@veridicus.com>
To: <mono-list@ximian.com>
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 6:57 AM
Subject: [Mono-list] Windows Forms...wah


> 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
>
>
>
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