A VS.NET programmer is looking at MonoDevelop and pinpoints its goods and bad points.
A VS.NET User’s look at MonoDevelop
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Review more about glade and his first encounter with container widgets. This is real common. Monodevelop, however does look promising.
From the Glade FAQ.
“2.1 When I add a widget to a window, it fills the whole window and I can’t
add any other widgets.
This is not a bug in Glade! In GTK+ you use containers to lay out your
widgets. The commonly-used containers are at the bottom of the main
page on the palette. Try adding a vertical box to a window in Glade.
Now add a table to one of the positions in the vertical box.
Do you get the idea now?
If you really want to position widgets at specific coordinates, try the
Fixed container. However, this isn’t recommended since your
windows/dialogs will not look good when resized, and if you translate
the text in the labels and buttons into other languages they may not fit”
The day they integrate a GUI designer on it, in a way that we can drop some controls, double-click them and add the code, a la VS.Net, Mono will have their first killer app.
Considering it’s a rather young project, they’ve come a long way though, great work.
The article? well it let me looking for a “next page” link at the bottom.
Exactly. The box layout used in gnome is such a treat. Pretty much every window can be resized, and it is resized intelligently. After getting used to gnome and then trying to use windows I find myself being frustrated with unresizable dialogs, and clipped text caused by the use of fixed layouts.
When I first switched to developing linux gtk apps getting used to the layout model was weird. But once I got going I was fine. It is really nice to be able to easily create a gui that can be resized, and have different fonts/languages, without wrecking that layout. Back when I was developing for windows it used to take so long to tweak the gui to do all that.
My background is something like:
Delphi > Java/Swing > Ruby-GTK
Check out this big (almost 1600×1200) screenshot with some apps that I’ve written so far:
http://www.geocities.com/canalruby/big_screenshot.html
(mirror) http://www.geocities.com/joaopedrosa/big_screenshot.html
I’ve added the ability to use the famous “alignment” to LEFT, TOP, RIGHT, BOTTOM and CLIENT to the layout container. Besideds that, I’ve created a couple of easier methods that allow for easy creation and positioning of the widgets, I called them vpack e hpack, each creates another VBox or HBox to which the widgets (or strins for label and integers for spaces) in the parameters will be passed. In summary, it has become the easiest thing to do in the program, to layout were I want the widgets.
The drawback to my approach? I don’t use a visual designer (besides the obvious that it was written with Ruby. 😉
So yes, GTK is very capable, you only has to unleash its power.
Sorry for the English errors.
It’s my understanding that Glade will not be integrated into MonoDevelop and a new, general gui builder is in the works for gtk+/gnome.
>”The day they integrate a GUI designer on it, in a way that
>we can drop some controls, double-click them and add the
>code, a la VS.Net, Mono will have their first killer app.”
Check out monodevelop…the mono port of sharpdevelop (a free C# and VB.NET IDE that almost completely mimics VS.Net). It has a gui designer just like VS.Net.
Sharpdevelop is only for windows… Monodevelop doesn’t have a GUI designer.. yet
Wow, Monodevelop has a pretty awesome interface. Is it based on an existing IDE for another language? If it is not, i think the Monodevelop team should break into a project to create a great GTK-based IDE and a project to make C#/.Net programming user-friendly.
monodevelop is based on the sharpdevelop open source project (www.icsharpcode.net) which runs on windows only. so they took most of the code, ported it to GTK# (sharpdevelop uses Windows Forms) and there.
The tired Linux zealot mantra is “Microsoft doens’t innovate, they just copy from other people.” Yet, when a new IDE that is so similar to Visual Studio–down to the Application Wizard and icon choices for Code Completion pop-up (which is also copied from VS) no one bats an eye.
Hypocrisy, pure and simple.
Using different icons or a different application wizard is no innovation either, it would be simply different. Not all innovations are shown in screenshots.
Sharpdevelop and Monodevelop are free, scaled-down, alternative options for those who don’t want or can’t buy VS.Net (which can be good for MS since it expands their user-base). There’s no problem on making a familiar interface on this case, so people don’t have to learn everything from scratch when moving from/to Sharpdevelop or Monodevelop.
Finally, MS was not the first to create those wizards etc…
And that stuff didn’t come from Borland Development Applications? One thing is to copy something and recognize publicly that you did it. And other different thing is to copy or steal something and call it “innovation”.