Leaving the Gtk# project

[Christian Hoff]

Hi all,

after working on Gtk# for over a year, I now have to leave the project
for my study at IBM starting at October 1st.

There are a few patches that I started to work on and which I hope to
get finished along with my study. First, I'd like to get the out-array
fix ready.
Unfortunately, the IList/DataView tree model won't make it into Gtk# as
a clean implementation can only be done by using extension methods. The
code is basically ready and I think that it would be a nice extension
for a 3rd party project (possibly Gtk# beans).

It's great to see how Gtk# and Mono in general have evolved. There are
quite a few improvements in Gtk# trunk:
- GIO bindings
- Support for virtual methods in the generator
- Massive deglueing
- A much more powerful GLib library
- Lots of bug fixes

I hope that Gtk+ and Gtk# 2.90 will be released soon. I'll stay
subscribed to the gtk-sharp and gtk-sharp-bugs lists at least until then.

My thanks go out to Mike Kestner for all the patch reviews,  for his
patience in some endless IRC sessions and finally for starting to work
on the bindings years ago. He even sacrificed much of his free weekend
time doing patches for Gtk#. Thank you very much, Mike!


Christian
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[Andrew York-2]

Congratulations it sounds like you have bright future ahead of you. I have appreciated the work you have done, I may not ask a lot of questions but I read a lot answers and documentation and a great many of them were from you. I am just a simple ordinary MS programmer who like to do Mono/Gtk# programs for fun and you have helped make it fun.

Thanks
SpoodyGoon

Christian Hoff wrote:

Hi all,

after working on Gtk# for over a year, I now have to leave the project 
for my study at IBM starting at October 1st.

There are a few patches that I started to work on and which I hope to 
get finished along with my study. First, I'd like to get the out-array 
fix ready.
Unfortunately, the IList/DataView tree model won't make it into Gtk# as 
a clean implementation can only be done by using extension methods. The 
code is basically ready and I think that it would be a nice extension 
for a 3rd party project (possibly Gtk# beans).

It's great to see how Gtk# and Mono in general have evolved. There are 
quite a few improvements in Gtk# trunk:
- GIO bindings
- Support for virtual methods in the generator
- Massive deglueing
- A much more powerful GLib library
- Lots of bug fixes

I hope that Gtk+ and Gtk# 2.90 will be released soon. I'll stay 
subscribed to the gtk-sharp and gtk-sharp-bugs lists at least until then.

My thanks go out to Mike Kestner for all the patch reviews,  for his 
patience in some endless IRC sessions and finally for starting to work 
on the bindings years ago. He even sacrificed much of his free weekend 
time doing patches for Gtk#. Thank you very much, Mike!


Christian
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[Mike Kestner-4]

On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 18:29 +0200, Christian Hoff wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> after working on Gtk# for over a year, I now have to leave the project
> for my study at IBM starting at October 1st.

Christian,

Thanks again for all your work on the project.  You've tackled some
tricky issues and done a great job on them.  Best of luck with your work
at IBM, and don't be a stranger.  Still looking forward to more patches,
though maybe fewer and farther between.  :-)

Mike

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[Christian Hoff]

Daniel Morgan wrote:
> "the IList/DataView tree model won't make it into Gtk# as
> a clean implementation can only be done by using extension methods"
>
> Why would this not be clean?
>
> Is it because you do not want to depend on System.Data?
>
> Try using descriptors from System.ComponentModel like ASP.NET does for its controls.
>  
That's what the new TreeModel is doing already; you pointed me to the
ComponentModel interfaces in a mail your wrote to the list about a year ago.

There are basically four ways to implement such an "IListStore" in Gtk#:

1. Extend ListStore to implement IList. The disadvantage here is that
this is only useful if the list is created inside your program. When
getting an IList back from the .net framework methods, this approach
would be useless.

2. Add a ctor and something like an "IList" property to TreeView,
ComboBox, ... and keep the model internal. This would be more
use-friendly than exposing the model, but it would mean adding new
members to each tree-model based widget. Custom or 3rd party widgets
would not be able to use this capability.

3. Same as 2., but no ctor and "IList GetItems"/"SetItems (IList)"
extension methods instead of the IList prop. The extension methods could
reside in Gtk.Dotnet. This means that we can seperate the code better,
but extension methods are a .net 3.5 feature and we do not plan to make
Gtk.DotNet depend on .net 3.5.

4. Expose the new TreeModel and add it to Gtk.Dotnet. Unfortunately, the
user would have to know GInterface implementation: new TreeView (new
TreeModelAdapter (new IListStore (my_list)));
Not really user friendly, but I'm starting to like this idea more and
more. If we document this explicitly, this should not be a hurdle that
is too difficult to take. Would also be useful for 3rd party widgets.

By now I planned to implement approach 3 in a 3rd party project, but now
I consider integrating it into Gtk# via approach 4 or 2.

Another issue(besides the difficulties diescribed above) is that Mike
doesn't think that the community is too interested in such a capability.
But every time I see a ListStore being populated with data from a
DataView, I'm starting to think otherwise. So if you need such a
feature, please reply ;-) .


Christian
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