[Mono-list] Newbie question: GUI choice

[Duncan Mak]

Hello Fabien,

On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 23:45 +0100, Fabien Meghazi wrote:
> That would be perfect if in the future Windows.Form would use Qt#
> under kde and Gtk# under Gnome.
> That would bring consistency to mono applications under unixes and GUI
> consistency is what unixes need.

The current implementation of Windows Forms is already the 3rd design of
how to implement such an API. In the initial implementation, we tried to
abstract the API into an intermediate layer with interfaces, believing
that it is possible to have multiple pluggable rendering back-ends as
you've suggested above.

Very quickly, the complexity of the managing the various layers of
abstractions got completely out of control. Other than very simple demos
(one form, one button), we were not able to get anything to work.

The current implementation, based on libgdiplus/GDIPLUS.DLL, is the
simplest design yet. Hopefully this design will stick.

-- 
Duncan Mak <duncan@ximian.com>