UI going forward

[clutch110]

As a nearly full time Linux user I have a couple of questions about the UI direction.

I have seen that you have dumped a lot of effort into the Winforms based UI. Does Mono fully support the Winforms UI elements? I have not looked into this nor tested the current branch to try and test.

I know the base for the QT UI is there, I even submitted a bug report with a patch. Is it worth pursuing two different UI tracks if Winforms works on all Mono supported platforms?

Thanks for the hard work you have poured into this so far. I hope to be able to contribute more in the future but my ability is far below what would be needed to contribute significantly to this project.

[IBBoard]

It's good to see some more Linux interest. I use Linux every day. The only time I'm in Windows is 1) when I'm at work on my corporate machine (my dev machine is Linux, though), 2) when I'm using a VM to do WinForms dev or 3) when I'm borrowing my wife's laptop. Other than that I do everything (including most WarFoundry dev) in Linux.

I have seen that you have dumped a lot of effort into the Winforms based UI. Does Mono fully support the Winforms UI elements? I have not looked into this nor tested the current branch to try and test.

I've not tested the re-worked UI in Linux, but the slightly older WinForms seemed to run fine in Linux. Mono has progressed greatly over the years and is generally quite good with WinForms support.

I know the base for the QT UI is there, I even submitted a bug report with a patch. Is it worth pursuing two different UI tracks if Winforms works on all Mono supported platforms?

I'd say yes for two reasons: 1) check out the screenshot in the earlier link. WinForms works, but it looks like Win95 theming and so isn't pretty - Qt# and GTK# let you have native looking apps (and GTK# works on Windows as well) and 2) if MS does ever do anything with the patents that it claims it has (but which they've never released details of) then WinForms might be hit, but the core of Mono is an international standard under patent agreements and the Qt#/GTK# toolkits wouldn't be affected.

Thanks for contributing. If you want to get more involved in the development then feel free to drop me a message so that I can set up Subversion access for you. Your patch has already been applied and is in source control