[Mono-winforms-list] General hello

[Mike Hearn]

Hi,

I've been working on Wine for a few months now, and thought I'd
subscribe to this list to watch your progress, and perhaps help make
communication between the two projects a bit better. I've had a quick
flick through the archives, thoughts on a few issues:

* threading: lately Alexandre has been committing support for NPTL
threads, which are being phased in as part of some kernel and glibc
changes. Apparently that'll allow you to link in Linux pthreads with
Wine, so making things easier for you guys - but not on the current
generation of distros. Miguel mentioned it might simply be a matter of a
patch to wine to include the features you guys use from pthreads.

* WinForms vs GTK+ implementation. IMHO, go for Wine. You will not get
good results attempting to slap another widget toolkit on top of an
application. I don't think it'll look any more "native", in particular
Windows apps expect to have the Windows look and feel. A GTK+ app that
used Windows style icons and artwork, with Windows style layouts would
just look very wierd on the desktop and would probably be confusing for
end users.

* Theming: having said that, if a developer wishes to make their SWF app
integrate well, it should be possible to add support for at least some
parts of GTK themes into Wine, probably enabled with WineLib extensions,
meaning that you continue to use the SWF/Win32 APIs to produce the
controls etc, but you build in special support with whatever the .NET
equivalents of #ifdefs are to reverse the button ordering, select the
right artwork and so on.

The best way to implement that would I think be to implement the uxtheme
APIs introduced with Windows XP. That was discussed on the wine-devel
mailing list a month or so ago.

That's it for now, I look forward to seeing your progress on this
matter! If you have any wine-related questions I might be able to
answer, or maybe put you in touch with the right people, let me know :)

thanks -mike