Re: [DotGNU]System.Windows.Forms Coding Competition

[Rich Baumann]

On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 04:32 -0800, Gopal V wrote:
> Gradients & Paths support. Remember that
> System.Drawing is included in the contest 
> by proxy :)

First on the wishlist: we need to move a lot more of the System.Drawing
functionality down into the toolkit layer. For example, the StringFormat
class should be a wrapper around a toolkit class via a toolkit
interface. The existing functionality would go into a default
implementation class which would only be used in toolkits not providing
an implementation by other means. For windows, for example, the toolkit
implementation would actually be a wrapper around an actual GDI
StringFormat object. For X it would stay as it is for now, though we
still eventually need to migrate the X implementation down into a C lib.
The same is true of DotGNU.Images, in my opinion. We should minimize the
use of managed code wherever possible in our drawing and imaging code.
For X, when Render isn't available, we should use the approach other X
toolkits use, which is to draw everything client-side on an image
buffer, then send the result to the server, so things are consistent no
matter what X extensions are, or are not, available. Even just moving
the implementation down into the toolkits would be a huge improvement
for now, since switching System.Drawing.Win32 over to a light wrapper
around the GDI flat API requires that be done first.

Second on the wishlist: shitloads of unit tests.

Third on the wishlist: Amanda Tapping; though that wouldn't exactly
qualify for the competition, I'd be very grateful. :D


Rich