[Mono-list] Cross-platform GUI Toolkit

[Baltasar García Perez-Schofield]

Hi, there,

Winforms is rubbish on both linux and Mac and unlikely to get any better.
>

Winforms is not rubbish on Linux, it is maybe not perfect, but obviously
could be improved by ironing the most important bugs.

Winforms is quite good on Windows, since it is possible to build native
applications there.



> WPF is windows only and is not opensource and is it seems unlikely to be
> any time soon.
>

Interesting. Why is WPF so important that Microsoft is not going to open
it? I don't know what is WPF based on, but if it is a drawn toolkit, it
could be a solution.


> Xwt is immature, has limited widget support, Is largely unproven
> (nothing is using it, except maybe a very little in MonoDevelop) and
> is abandoned (no commits for 11 months)
>

This is quite strange. I mean, the whole Xwt thing. Why abandon it now,
anyway?

If you want to produce a cross platform app your best bet is to use an
> architecture (MVC or similar) which allows you to use a native GUI
> toolkit on each plaform. This is what I ended up with in my project
> WideMargin, WPF on windows GTK on linux.


This is what the Xamarin boys advice to do. It is obviously the best bet,
as you said, if you are going to support the burden of having different
sources for different environments (MVC is okay, but that is nevertheless
going to happen). Is it possible however, that there is not going to be a
simple way to deploy a graphical app in a cross-platform way?

I mean, come on, you can do it on Java, on Python... you can do that in any
high-level programming language... ¿except on Mono/C#?

Maybe Qt is the only answer. Many projects are abandoning Gtk+ in favor of
Qt. The problem is to be able to go with undocumented/unproven bindings.
Sad situation.
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