Mono's Winforms 2.0 is now API Complete

by Miguel de Icaza

Jonathan Pobst has posted the update on our Windows.Forms 2.0 work.

Some interesting points from his blog entry:

  • We are now API complete, which means that our public API is exactly the same as .Net's (all 12,776 methods).
  • The first check-in to our current Winforms implementation was on July 8th, 2004. It took 4 years to get here, and 6,434 individual SVN commits.
  • The toolkit is made up of 115k lines of code.

Also:

  • We currently have three backends: X11, OSX and Win32.
  • There is a Google Summer of Code effort to improve our theming and OS integration this summer.
  • Winforms 2.0 will also debut support for XIM to allow input for CJK character sets.
  • We have a nice binding to Gecko as our implementation for WebControl which we started last year (currently we are limited to Gecko on X11 though, no Mac support yet for this WebControl).
  • The Desktop team at Novell is adding UI Automation and accessibility support to Windows.Forms integrating it with Gnome's ATK. They have a full team dedicated to that goal.
  • R-to-L support: It is not an priority for us at this point, but it would be nice if someone with RtoL needs were to complete the work that Sebastien did last year to use Pango inside GDI+.

Winforms 2.0 was the last piece of code holding off the Mono 2.0 release. We anticipate that there will be bugs, so we want to encourage folks to submit their bug reports and to evaluate the portability of their sofwtare using our Mono Migration Analyzer tool.

Congratulations to the Winforms team, and everyone that provided bug reports, test cases, contributed code, tested and worked with us to bring it to where it is today.

Posted on 13 May 2008