[Mono-list] How to start a C# winforms project?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 11:50 -0500, Eric Miller wrote:
> It's been almost a year since I last tried. After a quick look at your 
> project it looks like it's time to try again. Did you use the 
> Monodevelop GUI designer for everything?

Not sure what "everything" means, but whatever it means, it was pretty
close to everything.  For the most part Gtk# + Stetic has been a
pleasure to work with.  There are some additional widgets, that work
well with Stetic, available at
<http://code.google.com/p/holly-gtk-widgets/>.  Those are certainly
worth checking out.  Medsphere provides four additional widgets
<http://medsphere.org/projects/widgets/>,  while they don't work with
Stetic (you have to manage them manually), they are very useful in some
cases.

All-in-all, I've no problems with Stetic, except the inability to move a
widget and it's design from one assembly in a solution to another.  You
can do it manually with a little bit of care.  It is best to put any
composite widgets / windows / forms that you might want to reuse in
their own assembly and then add that assembly to your application.
Stetic will pick them up just fine.

Gtk# is very nice.  Downsides of Gtk#:

1.) The documentation is a bit lacking.  Passable but not great.
2.) The availability of third-party widgets is pretty much limited to
the above.   For example (a big deal to me) is that there is no calendar
(day/week/month) widgets - although there are Gtk# apps that have such
widgets.  I suppose I just need to take the time to plunder them. :)  It
would be good if more Gtk# developers made more of their UI stuff
re-usable.
3.) The TreeView.   (!@*&@#(*&@#(* I hate that thing.   The TreeView is
an amazingly powerful widget whose documentation is akin to a pile of
fresh steaming turd.  NodeView is a nice improvement, except it is
greatly diminished in power (no sorting, etc... of course, that assumes
one can get TreeView to sort...)

> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > That is odd,  I've been working on one GUI
> > project <http://code.google.com/p/consonance/> in Monodevelop for at
> > least a couple of years.   The GUI desginer, and Monodevelop, used to
> > crash *constantly*,  but it has been quite stable for the last ~6
> > months.