[Mono-osx] Mono 2.6 and Windows.Forms on MacOSX

[Lee V. Andrus]

Andrew Brehm wrote:
> 
> ...
> (You need a name for your project!)
> ...
> IDEALLY we would need one project consisting of DLLs that allow native use
> of Cocoa classes and methods as well as a Windows.Forms compatibility
> wrapper. And the recommended way for .NET applications on Mac OS X would
> then be to use Windows.Forms and the wrapper and direct Cocoa classes only
> for some effects.
> ....
> 
I have floated the name "Cocoa Conspiracy" in this forum, but no one was
interested in conspiring with me.  My project is implementing
System.Windows.Forms.XplatUICocoa, the Cocoa Driver for Mono's MWF.  This is
the heart of the implementation of MWF.  It is not a bridge or thin wrapper
like the products we discussed.  It currently uses MObjc and MCocoa to
facilitate access to the Cocoa framework.  All the other implementations of
XplatUIDriver just use PInvokes to access the underlying window system APIs,
but they all are based on simple C functions calls.  Marshaling Mono
subclasses of the Cocoa framework classes across the divide is a big help.

The project's aim is to help the portability of .Net/Mono applications the
Mac.  Some insist you cannot get a really good UI without customizing it for
each platform.  But I believe that the ability to take an executable from
one platform to another, and get reasonably correct behavior and appearance
is achievable and will give a huge boost to cross-platform interoperability. 
There are other cross-platform GUIs (like GTK#) out there, but I suspect
that the people using them are outnumbered by .Net developers using SWF. 
SWF is key to making the Mac accessible to the .Net talent pool.  The Carbon
Driver is riddled with calls to functions that have been deprecated or are
not available to 64-bit applications.  Apple introduced Carbon to ease the
transition from OS 9 to OS X and seems more inclined to retire it than to
maintain it.
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