code monkey

Since the beginning of Winforms, we have ensured that our controls match the very ubiquitous and very ugly Windows Classic controls. These are the controls that you get if you do not call Application.EnableVisualStyles () before you start your application. For reference, they look like this: Now that we have things in generally working order, we can take some time to add spit and polish. For that, I am extremely pleased to mentor George Giolfan, who is working on our theming stuffs to give us better looking controls. He is doing this by creating a theme that renders controls using the VisualStyles namespace and refactoring our controls to support this. Since he is awesome, he has already been working on this since his Summer of Code application was accepted. Right now, it looks like this on Windows (Vista): While this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it doesn't really help our target users (Linux) yet. This will soon change, as the next step will be to implement the V...

Last night, we hit a very important milestone in our support for Winforms. We are API complete, which means that our public API is exactly the same as .Net's (all 12,776 methods). I wasn't around at the time, but the first check-in of Winforms occurred on July 8th, 2004, meaning it has taken almost 4 years to implement. Since then, there has been 6,434 commits to Winforms. Thank you to everyone who helped us get here! Thank you people who contributed code! Thank you people who contributed tests! Thank you people who contributed Bugzilla reports! What's next? Well, as with your typical 115k line cross-platform windowing/widget kit, there are bound to be bugs. So we'll be working to fix those. If you come across any, please report them so we can fix them too! Go here to report them. All of this will ship with our upcoming Mono 2.0 release.