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Diffstat (limited to 'mcs/class/Managed.Windows.Forms/Design')
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diff --git a/mcs/class/Managed.Windows.Forms/Design b/mcs/class/Managed.Windows.Forms/Design new file mode 100644 index 00000000000..c9fa450d553 --- /dev/null +++ b/mcs/class/Managed.Windows.Forms/Design @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ + Design of new implementation of SWF + =================================== + +0. About SWF: +============= + +SWF stands for System.Windows.Forms. This is a class library that +provides a set of controls for designing application UI. + + +1. Architecture: +================ + +The new implementation of SWF is based on drivers providing access to +the native windowing system of the host OS. The old implementation was +based on Wine library. The motivation for new implementation comes from +the problems faced with the Wine approach: +- Wine was missing features that .NET provided over Win32; to add those + features we would have had to write the controls managed anyway +- Installation became much more difficult due to the Wine dependencies + and the relatively akward way we had to initialize Wine. + +The new implementation takes advantage of Win32 APIs on Windows and +emulates the same on Linux using X11 for window management and events. +Following gives a high level idea of the new implementation of SWF. + + ------------------------------------- + | Managed SWF | + ------------------------------------- + | XplatUI Driver Interface | + ------------------------------------- + | X11 Driver|Win32 Driver|OSX Driver| + | | | | + | Mono on | Mono on | Mono on | + | Linux/Mac | Windows | Mac OS/X | + ------------------------------------- + +The above picture explains how the window management is done in the new +implementation. For drawing the controls System.Drawing library is used. +To handle some special needs for different platforms, there are a few +limited patches to System.Drawing to deal with calls from System.Windows.Forms + + +2. Design: +========== + +The new design of SWF makes porting of the library to Linux/Windows/Mac +very easy. +All the controls in SWF inherit from Control class and most of the painting +operations are done using ControlPaint class. At the low level, XplatUI class +provides the abstraction over the underlying window management system. It +contains a XplatUIDriver for providing the window management. XplatUIDriver +is an abstract class which is implemented by XplatX11 and XplatWin32 classes +respectively for Linux/Mac and Windows platforms. Support for any new platform +can be added simply by implementing XplatUIDriver for the new platform. + + +2b. Themes: +=========== + +The look of any control is supposed to be controlled by the chosen theme. +All control drawing needs to be done by the currently selected theme class. +The ThemeEngine class manages the themes. All the themes implement +Theme abstract class. The Theme class provides the drawing primitives for +all controls. The current implementation supports the Windows Classic theme +through the ThemeWin32Classic class and the Gnome theme through the ThemeGtk +class. Gnome support is still very incomplete (even more incomplete than SWF +itself) + + +2c. Multi-threading: +==================== + + As of this writing, multi-threading was fully supported, provided the + standard Microsoft implementation guidelines involving Invoke() are + followed. + + + +2d. Issues: +=========== + + - To be added when MWF reaches completion + |