Update: almost 12 years after I wrote this post, I have a 2019 Update on gui.cs
Every once in a while, people ask us "Will the Mono project implement WPF/XAML?" or "What is your position on Apollo?".
Some suggest that we must have a one-to-one implementation available in Mono. Some others believe that we should implement a new GUI toolkit and plot our own destiny.
Some argue that to win the hearts and minds of the Linux community we should appeal, not only to the desktop users, but also to other members of the community: system administrators, designers, musicians, perl programmers and users of Midnight Commander.
There has been a lot of debate over Flash, Adobe's Atlas and WPF/E and how these technologies might be the future of application development.
For the past few months we have heard you loud and clear. And we have been working on a technology that we believe will revolutionize user interfaces.
Today we are announcing the response to Microsoft's WPF/XAML, a response to Flash and WPF/E. A cross-platform GUI toolkit (supports Windows, MacOS and Linux and is easily ported to new platforms) written entirely in managed code and 100% open source. It is completely licensed under the MIT X11 license terms as well, for your freedom-zero needs.
We have been developing this under secrecy until we had something worth showing to the world. It builds on years of building user interfaces, toolkits and frameworks.
This is a preview release, currently the major sample application is a BitTorrent client built using Alan McGovern and Gregor Burger's MonoTorrent library (Alan and Gregor wrote this library as part of Google's Summer of Code 2007).
You can download a tarball from here, browse the source code here. To build the software, you will need to also download monotorrent and edit the Makefiles accordingly.
The BitSharp GUI is something that I quickly put together this weekend, so it might need some extra polish, feel free to send your MIT X11 contributions my way.
Everyone loves screenshots, you can see a few screenshots here. Or go directly to main window, torrent control and options configuration.
You can also see an early prototype, from the days when no color was yet supported on it here.
Some documentation is here.
In other news, there is now also a Windows.Forms GUI for the BitTorrent BitSharp libraries, available in http://code.google.com/p/monotorrent/.
Posted on 16 Apr 2007