Jackson Harper's Activity Log

Here is some love from the Mono System.Windows.Forms team. The following screenshots are examples from the winforms module running on our new managed implementation of windows forms. All the screenshots were taken on Linux using the (default) Win32 classic theme.

The new implementation of Windows Forms is fully managed (does not use Wine).

At the lowest level there is a driver interface that handles windowing and user interaction. Because an interface is used multiple windowing systems can be targeted. Currently X11 and Windows drivers are being actively developed.

The actual rendering of controls is done through System.Drawing. On Linux this means that Cairo is doing the actual rendering. If you are using glitz for your cairo output target your rendering will actually be hardware accelerated.

Sizing and drawing is handled by a theme interface. The entire control is rendered by the theme allowing a theme writer to have complete control over the drawing and sizing of a control as opposed to just having the theme handle drawing of lines, shapes, and colors. Most effort has been focused on the Win32 Classic theme (windows 95) so far. However Jordi has done some work on a Gtk theme (that uses gtk for rendering), and Fabian Luque has posted screenshots from his work on an XP theme to the mailing list (scrollbar groupbox).

If you are actually reading this and not just looking at the pictures, and would like to learn more about our new implementation of System.Windows.Forms read this.