Ran Windows Forms Under Mono

Officially, for the first time, I just a winform application using Mono instead of the Microsoft’s .NET engine. Woohoo! The program is a little bit of code I wrote a few months ago that will one day be a sentence diagramming tool. In terms of Windows Forms classes, I’ve got a menu, open and save dialogs, buttons, and a panel that I do a lot of System.Drawing stuff in for the diagramming. And I realize that MWF is still in heavy development, so don’t let the following make you think that I don’t like what they’re doing. I do! I just know it isn’t complete. Thoughts:

1. First off, this is very exciting to me. Can’t wait to run it on my Mac to see how it looks there!
2. All the System.Drawing code worked flawlessly under Mono.
3. The buttons worked fine.
4. The panel had sizing issues. It was implemented as a user control, so that may have something to do with it. But, the issue was that the panel’s size exceeded the size of the form to the right and to the bottom.
5. The open and save file dialogs are not implemented yet. One popped up a message saying "This hasn’t been implemented yet." The other just said the ubiquitous "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error, though the command line was issued a statement about not being able to load the class.
6. The calls to the dialogs were in my menu. For some reason, when the exceptions were thrown the menu items didn’t finish their call and close. They stayed open. I thought that was odd.

So, that was my first experience. Very pleased for a first go at this.

I’m also trying to get set up to build Mono from Subversion so I can get the latest and greatest, and maybe even contribute. That would be mucho fun. But, I’m still working on that. Have to do everything through Cygwin. That’s stuff I’m not used to, but it will come to me eventually, I’m sure :)