Mono's WinForms 2.0 Implementation Completed

adrian.henke writes "After four years of development, 115K lines of source code, and 6,434 commits, Jonathan Pobst announces that Mono's WinForms 2.0 implementation is now complete. This announcement has been long awaited by any .NET WinForms developer who has ever tried to get an applications to work on Linux using Mono."

Comments

This will be a big help

[Pikoro]

Currently working on a C# implementation of a web based in house CRM system.

Going to be nice to finally be able to support our Linux desktops as well.

We'll see how porting goes and if it's really worth the trouble.

Re:This will be a big help

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did he say that cross-platform support was required? There's a big difference between something that's required and something that's nice.

But can I actually use it for anything?

[beoba]

..and still nothing on whether WinForms is legally safe to use.

Re:But can I actually use it for anything?

[Vectronic]

"Worse, call the layers"

Which layer? does Mono have a self-destruct layer?

using System.Microsoft.Infringement;

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
      If (Patents.Count > 0)
      {
            ForEach(Match match in Patents
            {
                  Console.WriteLine(match.patentname + ": " + match.patentcode);
            }
      }
}

Error Buffer Overflow

Yeah, yeah... you meant "lawyers" I know... and I dont code in C# so it might not do anything anyways...but... "call the layers" made me laugh...

"This announcement has been long awaited ...

[Helmholtz]

...by any .NET WinForms developer who has ever tried to get an applications to work on Linux using Mono."

All five of them.

Re:"This announcement has been long awaited ...

[thegrassyknowl]

Five? I think you should stop rounding up to a whole hand!

Very nice

[nuzak]

> I use .NET all the time, but I can't say I like it half as much as Python.

I know what you mean -- ELF just doesn't hold a candle to Perl.

Re:too little, too late?

[nguy]

It is interesting that now that Mono is getting to a more complete (and possibly usable state), most developers have moved beyond the .NET hype and onto more elegant development platforms...

Please stop conflating Mono and .NET. Mono supports .NET, but that's not its primary API.

In fact, the primary API is the same API lots of open source software uses: Gnome, Gtk+, and many standard open source libraries. All Gnome apps using Mono use the Gtk+ APIs.

I wish there were better alternatives, but C# + Gtk# + MonoDevelop is probably the most elegant development platform right now. Nothing else really comes close. Python is a more elegant language but doesn't have a comparable IDE. Objective-C and Cocoa are messily intertwined with C and C APIs. And Java is a bloated pig.

Re:Would be awesome...

[batkiwi]

Info for you: .NET 3.0 is 4 additional dlls, otherwise it IS .NET 2.0. Same runtime/etc. It adds:

-WCF: GREAT new tech. You write a module, and then expose it remotely via config. So if you want to change from Remoting to Compliant Web Services you simply change a config setting. Or you can expose simple services via REST. It abstracts "transport" from "functionality".
-Cardspace: dud. Single sign on/identity mgmt which is being replaced by openID it seems. Cool idea though.
-WPF: Cool new xml based description language to fully abstract process from gui much in the way ASP.NET does. It also lets UI designers "skin" apps seperately from the app code itself. VERY nice tech, especially the bindings.
-WF: Nice tech, not quite mature but neat to use. It allows for program logic to be described in an xml format (XAML) and shown in a gui designer. I really like workflow tech NOT because it lets business users program (it DOESN'T) but because it gives you an artifact that users can understand AND CONFIRM. .NET 3.5 is enhancements and bugfixes of 3.0 PLUS LINQ. LINQ is either the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever, depending on who you ask. I think "both." LINQ allows you to apply "sql-esque" syntax to any IEnumerable provider. So if you have an in memory collection of animals you can do:

var monkeys = from animal in myAnimalsCollection
                              where animal.Type == monkey
                              select new {animal.ID, animal.Name, animal.BirthDay};

foreach(var monkey in monkeys) .... do stuff

Re:Would be awesome...

[setagllib]

LINQ is nice, except it's decades too late. Of the languages in common use today, Python and Ruby have much better alternatives to linq built in (and have had them for many years), and even new languages like Scala support similar functionality.

Your example in Python with a list comprehension, broken down into multiple lines for clarity:

monkeys = [
    (animal.id, animal.name, animal.birthDay)
    for animal in myAnimalsCollection
    if animal.type is monkey
]

And a comprehension of multiple lists is similar:

pairs = [
    (a, b)
    for a in range(10)
    for b in range(10)
    if b == a * 2
]

You have been able to do that for many years in Python, and yet Microsoft fanatics act like it's something new and innovative.

Re:Would be awesome...

[makapuf]

The python version reads from an iterable, so it can be a request from a DB or an XML file sending its result one by one. In the case of the Db, the filtering will however be done by python and not in the DB.

However, there are alternative ORM python syntax to DB mappings, such as django syntax

AnimalCollection.filter(type='monkey')[:10].order_by('age')
(talking about simple orms, not full sqlalchemy table declaraions)

Being able to customize filtering of container classes for iterators definition would be cool anyway.

Re:too little, too late?

[Simon Brooke]

Java is fast? Go try to run Azureus and weep.

Oh, you do? And you think it is fast? Try utorrent on Windows or Transmission on OSX or KTorrent on Linux some time.

People can write slow programs in any language. The question is, can moderately competent programmers write fast, efficient, maintainable programs in them? Pointing to one example is pointless. Back on topic, a quick check on Alioth will show you that overall, Java is faster than C#/Mono but uses more memory (although on some benchmarks the opposite is the case). It's also worth pointing out that although Java is not faster than C++ on any benchmark, it's substantially slower on only three. In general the performance of a program has much more to do with good design and good algorithms than it has to do with choice of language.

Re:too little, too late?

[setagllib]

It's a pretty thin layer compared to an entire extra base library + bytecode runtime + OS abstraction.

PyGTK layers:

Your code (python)
PyGTK code (python)
Python runtime (C)
PyGTK->GTK binding (C)
GTK+libc code (C)
kernel (C)

IronPython + Gtk# layers:

Your code (python)
IronPython code (python)
IronPython runtime (CLI)
Gtk# code (CLI)
Mono base (CLI)
Mono runtime (C)
Gtk# -> GTK binding (C)
GTK+libc code (C)
kernel (C)

That's a fun one to deploy, let me tell you.

Re:Would be awesome...

[Just Some Guy]

You can use the same LINQ syntax to deal with data from all kind of data sources, that's what it is all about.

All the usernames on a Unix system:

print [line.split(':')[0] for line in file('/etc/passwd')]

Dates from an SQL table:

sth.execute('select invdte from invoice where invid=%(invid)s', {'invid': 1000090340})
print [row[0] for row in sth]

Search Google for "list comprehensions" and print the text of every "<a href" tag on the page:

import urllib2
import BeautifulSoup

agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)'
url = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=list+comprehensions'
google = urllib2.Request(url, headers={'User-Agent': agent})
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(google).read())
print [link.contents for link in soup.findAll('a')]

Basically, anything Python can loop across works inside a list comprehension. It's a basic construct of the language.