[Mono-winforms-list] Windows Forms is crucial for the future success

[Jackson Harper]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 08:57, Mark Gimelfarb wrote:
> nothing will happen with it until the re-write happens (which is in
> progress, AFAIU). 
   
  The new rewrite has begun but it is more of an archetictural stage
right now. It will be in full swing next week, and a considerable amount
of effort will go into it. There will be more Novell developers working
on winforms then any other component of Mono. So I would expect it to be
useable very shortly.

>  I would like to help, if
> I can, when the WinForms folks get to point when they've got something
> to show and need help with.

  You can help right now by developing small test cases on windows.
Extremely simple forms with one or two controls that cover the gamut of
a controls functionality. Having these test cases written before we
develop a control will save us test writing time and give us a nice
blueprint for a controls functionality. If you are an experienced
winforms developer try to include or document any "strange" behavior a
control may have that might not be obvious to us when we begin
developing the control. Obviously larger test cases will also be useful,
but a good set of small functional test cases will be extremely useful
when developing SWF. Short of writing test cases just documenting any
non obvious or poorly documented functionality would be very useful.

> 	As far as WinForms being the most important part of the project, while
> I might be _partially_ with you on that one, I'm afraid that we both are
> going to get flamed by the ASP.NET programmers out there :) I'd like to
> avoid that, if possible. So, no flames, please, I'm not making any
> claims to that effect here. :)

  There is no single most important part of Mono. Mono is useful as a
whole but how useful would a complete System.Windows.Forms
implementation be without a corlib or runtime? And besides we all know
the assembler is the most important part of Mono ;-).

> 	I too, would like to run all my current WinForms projects under Mono on
> Linux, and I also have to put all of them on hold, so I'm with you on
> that one.

  See above pieces on test cases. Also as we progress in the
implementation please test your applications on Mono as often as
possible and file bug reports on any regressions or incorrect
functionality, no matter how mundane.

Thanks for the cheer-leading Mark, much appreciated,
Jackson