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Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

praeclarum.org

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Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#31

Post by barrkel »

floatboth wrote: post #16
albertzeyer wrote: post #15

Now as .Net becomes more interesting again (for me), can someone comment on the state of GUI app development in .Net? Can I write cross-platform GUI code, or would I need to re-implement the GUI on every platform? Do Windows .Net GUI apps (does that mean Windows.Forms?) work just as-is on Linux (and maybe MacOSX)? What would be the best supported GUI .Net framework? QtSharp? Windows.Forms? I found some overview here,…

WinForms works on Mono (but looks like ass). WPF doesn't. The best way is probably Gtk#.

As someone who tried to use WinForms on Mono on Linux, I'll save everyone who tries a few hours evaluation work: don't waste your time.

Text components in particular are very broken. Text selection, context menu, copy and paste, cursor movement, rendering, it's all very shaky.

Use Gtk# on Linux.

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#33

Post by jongalloway2 »

albertzeyer wrote: post #15

Now as .Net becomes more interesting again (for me), can someone comment on the state of GUI app development in .Net? Can I write cross-platform GUI code, or would I need to re-implement the GUI on every platform? Do Windows .Net GUI apps (does that mean Windows.Forms?) work just as-is on Linux (and maybe MacOSX)? What would be the best supported GUI .Net framework? QtSharp? Windows.Forms? I found some overview here,…

For mobile forms-based applications, Xamarin.Forms looks pretty good: http://xamarin.com/forms

For cross-platform desktop applications, I've been keeping an eye on Perspex: https://github.com/grokys/Perspex

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#35

Post by jchannon »

tiernano wrote: post #6
josteink wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without crazy licensing fees as with Mono Are you confusing Mono for Xamarin?

Mono is the framework (like .Net) and Xamarin is the tooling (like Visual Studio). Framework is free (essentially) and the tooling is like VS (starter is free, pro is not so free but has more tools)

OmniSharp will help http://omnisharp.net

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#36

Post by praeclarum »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #28
adolfojp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross platform .NET usually means using a native toolkit on each different platform and the result is WPF on Windows, GTK# on Linux, and MonoMac on Mac. The purpose of this is to avoid the uncanny valley of cross platform toolkits like Java Swing at the expense of writing extra UI code. Some wrappers like Eto.Forms and XWT exist but don't expect drag and drop visual designer tooling. Thanks to Mono WinForms is sort o…

>Cross platform .NET usually means using a native toolkit on each different platform and the result is WPF on Windows, GTK# on Linux, and MonoMac on Mac. What are the odds Microsoft announces WPF open sourcing and maybe a wrapper of some sorts for OSX support at Build this year? I give it at least 50/50 on the open sourcing part.

AFAIK WPF is managed by the Windows team. All this open sourcing has been happening form the Azure and developer teams. Chances of Windows open sourcing some of their code? Less likely.

As someone who worked on WPF though, I will comment that the code may not actually be too useful. It is heavily tied to Windows and its graphics infrastructure.

I'm more interested in seeing something like Moonlight ported to modern platforms.

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#37

Post by elektronjunge »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #28
adolfojp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross platform .NET usually means using a native toolkit on each different platform and the result is WPF on Windows, GTK# on Linux, and MonoMac on Mac. The purpose of this is to avoid the uncanny valley of cross platform toolkits like Java Swing at the expense of writing extra UI code. Some wrappers like Eto.Forms and XWT exist but don't expect drag and drop visual designer tooling. Thanks to Mono WinForms is sort o…

>Cross platform .NET usually means using a native toolkit on each different platform and the result is WPF on Windows, GTK# on Linux, and MonoMac on Mac. What are the odds Microsoft announces WPF open sourcing and maybe a wrapper of some sorts for OSX support at Build this year? I give it at least 50/50 on the open sourcing part.

Doubtful. WPF isn't even the recommended GUI toolkit on windows anymore.

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#38

Post by praeclarum »

floatboth wrote: post #16
albertzeyer wrote: post #15

Now as .Net becomes more interesting again (for me), can someone comment on the state of GUI app development in .Net? Can I write cross-platform GUI code, or would I need to re-implement the GUI on every platform? Do Windows .Net GUI apps (does that mean Windows.Forms?) work just as-is on Linux (and maybe MacOSX)? What would be the best supported GUI .Net framework? QtSharp? Windows.Forms? I found some overview here,…

WinForms works on Mono (but looks like ass). WPF doesn't. The best way is probably Gtk#.

In terms of maturity and feature-completeness, GTK# is the answer. Unfortunately, it's no beauty either.

Especially on Mac it does its own control rendering and, while it tries to match the OS, has problems.

XWT was meant to replace GTK# and has some good underpinnings but it doesn't seem super active right now.

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#39

Post by praeclarum »

josteink wrote: post #4
henderson101 wrote: post #3

If this can be used to open up more platforms, without crazy licensing fees as with Mono and mobile devices, I think it is a very positive step forward.

> without crazy licensing fees as with Mono Are you confusing Mono for Xamarin?

Mono has a lot of GPL code. Xamarin has a license to impart commercial licenses to their customers. So Xamarin customers are fine. Mono users will have to abide by the GPL'd bits.

Microsoft's CoreCLR is MIT licensed. Nice. :-)

Re: Building and Running .NET’s CoreCLR on OS X

#40

Post by praeclarum »

sklogic wrote: post #34
chii wrote: post #9

i wonder if other languages can start targeting the CLR, and have a competing cross platform runtime to java that's got a big name behind it.

You can run Java on top of .NET and Mono easily, see iKVM.

In fact it runs quite well on .NET. My favorite demo is seeing how much faster Eclipse loads on the .NET runtime than the Java.
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