Winforms on Linux - Mono 2.0 Winform API is complete(?)
So looks like that the Mono project has reached a significant milestone by completing all of its Winform 2.0 API.
And it encouraged me to get back into evaluating Mono's progress. A while back, I was disappointed that the rich text box component not functioning well, actually back than it simply crashed.
I wanted to check out whether Mono has made good progress with it. So I fired up my VMWare Suse machine , checked the mono version there - it was an early version (1.2.5) . looks like it was a while back since I've touched it.
Installing the 1.9 version was pretty easy, just download it from the mono site, switched to root user by executing 'sudo su' on a terminal window, and then running the trivial installation commands
tar -jxvf mono-1.9.1.tar.bz2
cd mono-1.9.1
./configure
make
make install
/usr/local/bin/mono -version -> shows you that you've got the right version
BTW, if you're downloading the VMWare image from the link above , it is already preinstalled with the 1.9.1 version
Next I've created a simple Winforms application on Visual Studio 2005 on my windows box (which is also the host of my linux suse virtual machine), it is a simple winform with a RichTextBox component and a button that opens up a file dialog.
I've tested it by opening a simple rtf file.
which includes both free text and an image.
Next, I needed to move my compiled winform.exe file to the suse virtual machine side. The easiest way to do this is to make sure there is a network connection between the virtual machine (guest) and the host machine and use the smbclient command to connect to the host machine folder from the virtual machine.
Here is a simple command line
smbclient -w domain -user username \\[remote ip] password
this is what I used
smbclinet -w domain -user user1 \\\\192.168.1.2\\share my_password
within the smbclient application you can use the following commands (which resembles ftp commands)
cd - change remote directory
lcd - change local directory
get - get a file
dir - list remote directory content
So I got my rtf_window.exe and the sample rtf from my host machine into my virtual linux box, executed the application , loaded up the rtf file and this is what I got.
Reminder , this is how it should look like
Looks like some of the font properties are missing and images are not supported at all.
Overall it looks like that the Mono guys have done a really good job in providing a real cross platform alternative , but there's just this nagging RichTextBox thing..
Hey Mono guys, if you can fix this that would be great...
(could it be that images are stored as BMP which is Microsoft's IP ?)
Update : using the latest stack (mono-103389.tar.bz2 and libgdiplus-101878.tar.bz2 ) doesn't help either