[MonoDevelop] Forms Designer in MonoDevelop

[Mike Krüger]

Hi

> If you are saying that the SharpDevelop designer uses P/Invoke (DLLImport)
> to access unmanaged libraries then I agree, porting the SharpDevelop
> designer to MonoDevelop may be the wrong approach.  I would very much like
> MonoDevelop to stay dedicated to being cross-platform.
> 

No p/invokes are used for the designer :)

> If what you are saying is that the SharpDevelop designer relies on .NET
> classes which are incomplete in Mono currently then I do not see why this
> has to shoot down the idea of a designer in MonoDevelop so quickly.
> 
> I imagine that a good number of the people asking for or expecting to find a
> forms designer in MonoDevelop are currently on the Windows platform. 
> Running only on Windows for the moment would still be useful.
> 
> If I get some free time one of these days I could try to run the stand-alone
> designer on .NET to get an indication of how well it works when the platform
> support is there.  I could also poke around the designer in SharpDevelop to
> see how easily it might be ripped out.  I just thought somebody more
> knowlegable, like Mike perhaps, might be able to quickly tell me if breaking
> the problem in two like this would actually make anything easier.
> 

Ripping out the forms designer shouldn't be that hard at all (in fact
it's 'just' ripping out some services which should be provided) -
integrating it into monodevelop ... is a lot of work, but doable.

Regards
Mike