[MonoDevelop] Forms Designer in MonoDevelop

[Mike Krüger]

Hi

> That's sad...sorry for the ignorance, but how much work it is to 
> integrate the current mwf-designer stand alone app?, beside as far as I 
> know, sharpdevelop it have one, I know that it probably use .Net 
> services and clases that don't exist in mono or are not complete, but 
> each mono release is more feature compatible with .Net, so may be is not 
> to much. I also know that if you think in a really feature complete, 
> stable, etc mwf-designer comparable with the VS.NET one is probably a 
> big task, but may be is more doable to think in a "basic" one, that it 
> can be even unstable (sorry, but we are all use to have unstable 
> "features" in MD, come on, what feature in MD it wait to be really 
> mature to be included?). That can bring the attention and jump from 
> there...I can even offer my help if some of the MD gurus and hopefully 
> the mwf-designer developer can give me a hand...

Ok, my 2 cents (btw. I wrote the SharpDevelop forms designer):

The SharpDevelop forms designer uses the windows.forms built-in forms
designer infrastructure - that said it's not possible to translate it
1:1 to mono - even if the mono windows forms implementation is good -
the designer infrastructure is something different. 

Doing a forms designer from "outside" without the help of the framework
is almost not possible (we've tried that with sharpdevelop first) ... so
implementing a forms designer for monodevelop would require much work on
the mono windows forms implementation first (lluis already mentioned
that). And believe me - this is *MUCH* work (but it's doable :)).

I understand the need for a windows forms designer and I hope that we
get one contributed by someone who has the time & patience to implement
it. It's an open source project - we would like more people contributing
to it.

Personally I would like to see some improvements in stetic. Stetic could
really need some love. Our current shedule for the next release doesn't
include badly needed stetic improvements :( 

Regards
Mike