* System.Windows.Forms
Currently Windows.Forms support is not finished.
The System.Windows.Forms effort is taking two paths:
- Win32/Wine-based: This effort will use the Win32
API, and use a stub program to run the with Wine.
This allows applications that use P/Invoke to
function, and event delivery through the Wndproc
method to work for the most advanced and custom
applications. This is the path of best compatibility.
Also, work on a Gtk-based rendered for Wine will be
done, to make the user interface integrate with your
desktop look.
- Gtk# based: This effort will build a subset of
Windows.Forms that uses Gtk#. This gives a better
integration with the desktop, but will not be
completely compatible with the Windows edition. In
particular code that uses P/Invoke to call into Win32
or overwrite the Wndproc method to achieve special
effects will not work.
* Win32/Wine edition.
To get the Windows.Forms support working, you need a Mono
installation from CVS, and you need to install Wine plus the
OpenLink patch, and
define the environment variable "SWF" (export SWF=1 from your
shell). For more information, see the Mono
Wine Packages page in the Mono Wiki.
System.Windows.Forms is currently being implemented using the
Win32 API, we will be using WineLib on Unix systems to
emulate the Win32 API.
This means that those who want to contribute to the effort can
develop and test classes today using Windows and P/Invoke
calls to Win32 and we will then just run the result on Unix.
In terms of integrating visually with the desktop, we are
hoping to contribute to the Wine project a mechanism to make
it use the Gtk+ themes on X11 and Cocoa on MacOS to render the
widgets, and get the native look and feel on each of these
platforms.
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* Gtk# based
The code is contained in CVS.
There are no current plans to support embedded devices, but
Gtk/FrameBuffer is an option. If you have suggestions or
recommendations, please let us let us know
* Contributing
The Winforms effort is being coordinated in the mono-winforms-list@ximian.com.
If you are interested in helping out with this effort,
subscribe to it by sending an email message to mono-winforms-list-request@ximian.com.
If you want to help, you can start by writing a control and
testing it with Windows today (or you can also try to build
the existing library on Linux, but this is a bit more
complicated).
See the file mcs/class/System.Windows.Forms/CheckOutList for
details on who is working on which class.
Please read the README document in the
System.Windows.Forms/WINElib directory for details about how
to build the Windows.Forms support for Mono.
* System.Drawing
We currently have two code paths: the Wine-based
System.Drawing and the Cairo-based one. We will eventually
unify everything to use Cairo, but currently the effort can
continue with the approach we have.