mono -windows forms

im not sure if im allowed to post this or not, if not, please let me know

i switched to macs a coupla months ago and im developing with c#. so i dloaded mono and it works just fine except i cant use the System.Windows.Forms...i was looking around and found there are ways to do it, but nothings worked for me yet...

could someone please guide me in the right direction...i have bootcamp installed but i want to stick with mac

macbook black, Mac OS X (10.4.8), with winxp pro

Posted on Feb 19, 2007 6:06 AM

5 replies

Feb 19, 2007 1:55 PM in response to macDogg

Can I suggest that you refer to the mono-osx list ( http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-osx), in particular the archive where this is discussed several times. This list is also a better place to ask this type of question.

Remember that SWF is not yet fully implemented in mono but you should be able to get things going if you don't use "advanced" methods.

Susan

macDogg Author

Level 2

215 points

Feb 19, 2007 4:40 PM in response to Aussie Susan

I have been all over that site all day today through google...finally getting somewhere...SWF is working when invoked through X11 terminal, but not the regular one. At least this gets things rolling but I have no idea why this works or why the regular terminal doesnt

Feb 20, 2007 4:41 PM in response to macDogg

Basically, on Windows, the Microsoft SWF things tap into the various messages that the OS sends to the application.

Mono has to use the different messaging systems on the various OSs that it supports and yet create the same end-user effects.

My understanding is that they have managed to do this for the common (Li)(u)nix systems which use X11 as their underlying messaging system, but not yet for the native OSX GUI. (If you look at the mono web pages there is a brief mention of something going on in this area but I suspect that the information is rather old and probably out of date).

So, unless you (or someone) wants to get into the depths of this and write the 'driver', then X11 is necessary, at least for now.

The 'normal' terminal within OSX does not start the X11 display system, but the X11 terminal does. If you want to, I've found that you can start the X11 terminal and then shut it down (the X11 daemons etc will continue to run in the background) and the mono SWF code works well.

BTW, SWF is now built over the System.Drawing namespace and this is where the system interaction occurs.

Hope this explains the situation...

Susan

macDogg Author

Level 2

215 points

Feb 21, 2007 10:08 AM in response to Aussie Susan

Thank You for the elaborate reply. You just confirmed my last two days of research.

i will stick with SWF for now since my need for gui is not that great and i need it to work on windows with .net only.

Turns out sharp WT, Qt#, and wxNet support native IDE for macs, windows and linux. so those will be the obvious choice once the need arises.

I tried to run a msgbox for helloworld through bash while x11 was running in the background. It didnt work. running the same thing through x11 terminal worked just fine. I suppose I need to tell terminal to use x11 for IDE but I thought with x11 daemons running, there was no need. How would I go about this?

Mar 4, 2007 2:19 PM in response to macDogg

Sorry for the delay in replying.

Within the standard terminal emulator, you will need to enter

export DISPLAY=:0.0

This will tell all X11 programs running in the standard terminal emulator where to look for the X11 display 'client' (on your own machine). Of course you will need to have the X11 software running (I run the X11 app and don't use the X11 terminal).

Susan

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mono -windows forms