[MonoDevelop] Comments on Stetic GU designer

[John Luke]

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 09:44 -0500, Tony Caduto wrote:
> I don't want to hear "You have the source" fix it yourself either, I am
> not a monodevelop hacker and by the time the learning curve is out of
> the way I would have wasted a ton of time, so let's not start the you 
> have the source thing. (I only mention this because every time I have 
> pointed out a shortcoming in a open source project someone will say it)
> 
> I am sorry(not trying to start a flame war) but the whole panel way of 
> building a GUI is not intuitive at all and makes designing a simple GUI 
> a huge pain in the rear. A better solution would be to have 
> anchor/alignment properties or something similar for the fixed panel, so 
> I can make a edit control resize if I want to, that's how it's done in 
> Delphi and VS.net. Also in Delphi I can put a panel and I can set 
> alignment properties if I want stuff to resize automatically, for 
> example I can put a panel and align it to bottom, add a splitter then 
> another panel and align that to client.  The fact that MonoDevelop tries 
> to force the whole panel thing is ridiculous.

I think it is more work to add that then some people may realize.  I
(naively) think it would require an entire new designer engine apart
from the current one that has been evolved from the glade tools.  So I
don't think that monodevelop is trying to make your life difficult on
purpose.  I would personally rather see a matisse like approach rather
that adding support for gtk.fixed into stetic.

> 
> I love Linux and open source, but the development tools available pale 
> in comparison to Delphi or VS.net (Delphi is the best of course :-)  The
> only one that is close right now would be NetBeans 5.x, sorry the
> eclipse GUI builder stinks.

I agree, but keep in mind some of those tools have many, many developers
that work full time on those features.  Also, they have been around for
much longer so they have had time to implement more nice things.