Oren, I'm in the process of developing an application in VB and C# that uses no P/Invokes whatsoever. I haven't run into any places where it's truly necessary. Frankly, I don't have a lot of sympathy for developers who go under the hood and break portability for the sake of eyecandy.
What sort of P/Invokes are people using that actually provide needed functionality? Perhaps the solution is to provide the .NET developer community with encapsulations for the most common P/Invoke calls, so we can restore some portability. If they even begin to care about running on Mono (they will, soon enough), they'll use our compatibility layer. If they need a Win32 call that we haven't covered, they can create their own encapsulation over it and submit it to the project. Their alternative is to cut off a significant share of their potential market. In the case of the toolbar, for example, somebody could write a "Windows.Forms.SuperToolbar" object that would provide those features you need. Publish it widely, or in a central repository, and that's one less P/Invoke that's needed by end developers. Cheers! Eric >From: "Oren Novotny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: RE: [Mono-list] SWF Programming Question >Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 12:51:50 -0400 >charset="iso-8859-7" > >Miguel, > >If P/Invoke of the Win32 functions is not supported, then I think that >Mono's SWF implementation will be, for all intents and purposes, >useless. I have not yet seen a single, less than trivial, .Net Windows >application that did not use several P/Invoke's to the Win32 libraries. > >I'd understand not supporting P/Invoke into 3rd party libraries, since >you'd need to translate those. But I'd think that at least the Win32 >DLL's should be supported since most applications already use them. > >For example, anyone who is using a toolbar or menu control, other than >the included one, is relying on the ComCtrl32.dll library, among others. >Since the built-in toolbar and menu controls are pretty fugly and >feature-lacking, most people have chosen to use some other menu/toolbar >library. Likewise, many applications make calls to set an XP Theme on >certain controls that the .manifest trick isn't enough for. > >In the end, if Mono's SWF implementation doesn't take all of those >P/Invoke's into account, then I don't think that many people will be >able to use it since their apps have external dependencies. > >I hope that you reconsider. > >Regards, > >--Oren _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
