[Moonlight-list] Moonlight as a primary Mono GUI (+ about rendering engine)

[Kosenko Max]

Hello

We have a system (public communicational data intensive product) in
development that currently based on WPF/SL stack, but that has some
problems: WPF version - only desktop Windows and requires .NET 3.5
installed, SL - only sandboxed and only Win/Mac.

What we would like to have is Moonlight UI running inside Mono, compiled to
native code for any platform Mono has access to including mobile devices.
For consistency we don't want to have Win version based on WPF. But that
leads to the problem that Moonlight based on Cairo and it's not hardware
accelerated (for Mobile devices it's even more important) and not that fast
(well it's not yet even ready, but that will change in future, especially in
case Moonlight will be more than only Linux Silverlight).


>From Moonlight Notes pages I've read that there were thoughts about using
AGG 2.4. But problem with AGG is that it's C++ and more important that Max
doesn't have enough time to support this project and it's frozen several
years (group of users decided to combine effort to improve things, but
still). 

BUT - there is a successful huge work done by Lars Brubaker called Agg Sharp
(https://sourceforge.net/projects/agg-sharp/). It's 100% managed Agg (works
in Mono and even inside Silverlight!) which is very comparable in
performance (more than 50% of native and quite clear can be improved up to
~100%), working under real project and he even done most of same samples
that were present in AGG. And well it's BSD licensed. It has problems with
namings and some bugs, but in general this thing works (if not to think
about cleartype).

It's a very good MANAGED base for software renderer imho. What is more
important he was able to move some internal things for experiment to
Tao.OpenGL. It's a bit buggy now, but that can be improved. 

Don't you think that would be great to have Moonlight based on AGG Sharp +
OpenGL (including ES) + fast soft-render. And make it primary GUI Framework
for Mono?

Because GUI framework is important for Mono - it has very nice GTK# and
Win.Forms, but to be realistic - it's becoming obsolete and XAML base
frameworks looks much more interesting for developers (also think about
VS2010/Express, Expression Studio and so on).


What do you think about that?


Best Regards. Max Kosenko.
P.S. I have another large project in management related to multimedia which
would like to use same technique - Moonlight UI based on full Mono
framework. And I'm sure such GUI framework can obtain huge attention from
developers...
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