Re: Only MONO/WinForms is a way to go

On Nov 28, 2006, at 12:17 PM, Andrus wrote:

> Only MONO/WinForms  is a way to go in any serious application.


Funny. Did you read the original post? The poster wanted a *cross-
platform* GUI and his primary development environment was OS X. Mono
might run on a Mac after you install thousands of packages (see
instructions below), but the applications won't look like a native
Mac application. There are supposedly some native Mono toolkits for
the Mac, but I have yet to see any Mac application that uses it.

As I mentioned previously, XUL is worth a look for cross platform
applications. I would call FireFox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird serious
applications. And check out Komodo, an excellent cross platform
development environment built on this framework.



John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL




While MacOS X has its own GUI toolkit (Aqua/Cocoa), it also includes
support for X11 (Quartz accelerated). Gtk# (http://mono-project.com/
GtkSharp), Mono's cross platform graphical toolkit runs on MacOS X
but packages are not yet available for it or its dependencies (which
are numerous).

Today, if you want to run or develop Gtk# applications, Fink (http://
fink.sourceforge.net) is the best way to install all necessary
dependencies (gnome-desktop and all others). Installing GTK# on MacOS
is still a little effort intensive (instructions from Geoff Norton):

Install the latest Mono.framework
Install Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net)
Update fink to CVS (fink selfupdate-cvs)
Update fink to unstable
Update all fink core packages (fink update-all)
Install Apple X11
Install gnome and gtkhtml3 from fink (fink install bundle-gnome
gtkhtml3 gtkhtml3-dev gtkhtml3-shlibs)
Have a coffee / nap / go for a walk while fink installs Gnome.
Install Gtk# from source to the prefix /Library/Frameworks/
Mono.framework/Versions/Current (You will need to set the following
environment variables: PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/sw/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/X11R6/
lib/pkgconfig:/Library/
Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/lib/pkgconfig)