[Mono-list] gtk# or fox#

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> The thing is, I believe that a lot of work can be avoided if  mono uses
> something like this as our forms layer. The reason I think this, is that the
> fox toolkit only uses low level api's to do the drawing. So instead of
> expecting the current OS to draw a button, it tells the current OS to draw a
> few lines and fill them in to look like a button. (just an example, the
> actual details are different). This means that instead of supporting
> multiple versions of gtk with different platform support issues, we support
> one, and get the same look across platforms. It also means less to support
> (since there are fewer api calls). Fox was designed from the bottom up to
> work across platforms, so presumably there should be less work in making it
> platform specific to mono.

Gtk also does its own drawing;  but it can also use the Windows XP theme
API on Windows, so the look and feel is preserved on those system.  This
used to be a major complaint of Gtk+

> I don't think making interfaces to C# is the way to go though. It would be
> better to use a managed interface to C++, so all the code will work as is,
> (with future fixes as well). Is this currently possible in Mono?

We dont support managed C++ now.

> This seems very obvious to me, so it is surprising that it hasn't come up
> before. Therefore I expect I'm somewhere out in left field. Please feel free
> to correct me :)

I failed to understand your proposal.

Today we have:

	* Gtk# a GUI toolki for building applications on Unix and Windows.

	* System.Windows.Forms: implemented on top of Win32 (using Wine on
	  Unix).

miguel