Hi everyone, Here are some of my thoughts on the state of GUIs and Windows Forms.
+ Windows Forms has very nice native controls. It is fast, responsive but VERY POORLY designed. It is only a thin layer about native windows controls. Using native controls is *ok*, but they could have at least used the model-view-controller design pattern. The first thing I did when I started using Windows Forms was to write model/controller classes for lists and trees. + Swing is wonderfully designed. It is the best and most pure OO UI class library out there. It used to have major speed problems, but that hasn't been too much of an issue lately. + I really think that instead of porting Windows.Forms (which would be VERY hard), we should be thinking more along the lines of creating something similar to Swing or SWT. A swing like implementation would be better as you would have more control over component drawing (and thus better support printing and UI capturing). A designer plugin for VS.NET can easily be written to support the new toolkit. I think the added bonus of being able to *reliably* port .NET GUI applications to .NET would encourage people to use the new toolkit over Windows.Forms. + If a swing-like toolkit was written, only a few native routines would be needed. Drawing/blting (System.Drawing?), window creation and message/event dispatching. This would be trivial to implement on Windows and Linux. Most of the UI could then be written in portable managed code :D. ::Tum _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
