Channel 9 - Discussions by miguel.de.icaza

Coffeehouse - Mono releases new GUI toolkit, changes everything.

miguel.de.icaza — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:35:04 GMT

thumbtacks2 wrote:

And of course, OpenGL...although it's not typically associated with "desktop apps". Then again, it would be a lot of fun to change that perception...

Good point.

There are a handful of OpenGL custom-built UIs out there.

Blender has its own widget toolkit built with OpenGL. Clutter is another one (targetted at set top boxes) and various people are building some toolkits like that.

miguel.

Coffeehouse - Mono releases new GUI toolkit, changes everything.

miguel.de.icaza — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:08:16 GMT

Dr Herbie wrote:

That was my standpoint when I was asked by a previous boss to write a UI-independent .NET application. I pointed out the years of work required to got .NET to run on Linux and he decided against it

Today you have three choices to build a cross-platform GUI:

* Use Windows.Forms 1.1 API
* Use wxWidgets.NET (native UI on each platform, single API).
* Gtk#

And of course, the fantastic gui.cs

For more details see:

http://www.mono-project.com/Gui_Toolkits

Miguel.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 05:39:42 GMT

wkempf wrote:

I can certainly understand the reluctance to impliment the beast in Mono, especially if MS fails to submit it for standardization (which is likely). I was just wondering, after your comments about the Times reader, if you'd changed your opinion about the complexity at the user's level.

My comment at the time actually said:

miguel blog wrote:

This is one nice Avalon application, it distinguishes itself from all the samples that I have seen because it lacks a video playing in the background, and the buttons have not been rotated 30 degrees. It is one cute application, and I might have to eat my own words if someone from the New York Times developer team starts raving about their experience.

As it turns out, no NY Times developer started raving about their experience with Avalon, and that was because the application was not developed by the NY Times as a technology showcase, but it was instead built by Microsoft.

Miguel

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:44:35 GMT

corona_coder wrote:

I doubt thats the real Miguel De Icaza. As for Mono and .NET I dont think there is much need for Mono anymore now that Java is open sourced. Considering Microsoft owns patents in the .NET Framework, can the Mono team and even Novell say for sure that Microsoft will not go after them at all. Does the patent agreement cover Mono as well as SUSE Linux?

Spreading some FUD about Mono. It almost seems like you have an agenda of fear. I can tell you are not a Jedi.

Yes, the agreement covers Mono, you could do a Google search and have found that information for yourself.

As for whether I am Miguel or not, well, I guess we will never know. But it barely matters.

Miguel

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:40:02 GMT

j0217995 wrote:

Why do you doubt that is the real Miguel? Don't you think it's possible that he has heard of C9 and checks it or what is your thought process? it would be nice if it was

In my google portal page (www.google.com/ig) I keep a few feeds from blogsearch that keep track of where Mono is being discussed

Miguel.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:37:50 GMT

wkempf wrote:

I'd really like to hear what your more current thoughts are on WPF. I read your blog, so I know what you've said in the past, but I'm wondering if you've been swayed any now that it's released?

I still think that WPF is the J2EE of GUI toolkits. It has more features than Swing. Whether that is good or bad is left as an exercise to the reader.

The tools will likely offset the complexity inherent in WPF, and am sure that many Windows developers like it or will like it.

And in the same spirit that Ruby on Rails became a rational way of doing Web applications in the "spirit" of J2EE. I would personally like to see the "Ruby on Rails" of GUI applications, WPF is not it.

Currently we do not have plans of implementing WPF due to its sheer size. There are good news and bad news for anyone who might want to attempt that: WPF exposes so much of its implementation details that it is not a hard technical challenge. The bad news is that its a lot of code to write and tune.

Miguel.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:30:22 GMT

RoyalSchrubber wrote:

It's not about rotating buttons – it is about what you can do with vector graphics. And again - xgl and aiglx (currently) only allow you to make some fancy windows decorations (wm) and does not provide you with new widgets. Just watch video and then tell me if you can split video and put text on 3d surfaces as it was done with WPF. Yes, I know it could be done with some hardcore OpenGL hacks, but really - who will use OpenGL to develop standard GUI app??

xgl and aiglx as I explained before are merely virtualization frameworks for the actual rendering, you are confusing apples and dogs.

They are engines that are consumed by third parties (Gtk+ is one consumer, Qt is another consumer, Windows.Forms is another consumer). We call these "Toolkits".

Vector graphics support has been in use in Unix toolkits for a long time (I built Gnumeric on top of a retained, vector-based graphics system, called the "GnomeCanvas" at the time).

The foundation for Gtk+ and Qt (the main toolkits in use on Unix systems) have been vector based for a while.   With Gtk+ this happened in version 2.8, when the entire rendering engine was switched from raster graphics into vector graphics, while preserving the API.   A few "themes" were done to showcase the technology, but they are not commonly used.

With Qt it happened sometime with Qt 4, with their Arthur rendering platform.

Support for rendering SVG and controls using SVG is commonplace in Gtk+ and has been for many years, you just have not researched much:

http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/theme.php

The split between behavior and presentation was also done a long time ago.   Gnome shipped in 1999 the majority of its applications built with GladeXML: a format that described the UI and got loaded dynamically into the application at runtime (which simplified translations, tuning and targetting different screen resolutions and devices without touching the code).

Most Gtk# tutorials explain how this works (and how we automatically bind variables to widgets).   Gtk+ and Gtk# were "declarative UIs" a long time ago.

That being said, WPF has a lot of new things to offer, and the blend of features is nice and rich. The tools look fantastic and having Microsoft behind it will bring it to millions of people.

But there is no point in being partisan and having seisures on the internet over these things.

Miguel.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:50:49 GMT

sirhomer wrote:

.NET has all the disadvantages of Java (non-native code), with none of the advantages of Java (multiplatform code). And please don't say Mono, Mono is struggling with .NET 1.0 still.

There are certain features in .NET 1.0 that we are not going to support, not now, and we do not think they will ever happen.

But we have yet to find much use of it in the open, so we are quite happy (EnterpriseServices and a handful of others) but the rest works incredibly well.

We are certainly behind the times, and it is not as good in terms of cross-platformness as Java is, but porting software from .NET to Mono is not a multi-year effort it is a multi-day effort.

Miguel

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:47:02 GMT

RoyalSchrubber wrote:

Let me rephrase it – I am currently not aware of any other (beside WPF) widget toolkit (including Swing, SWT, Qt, GTK+, wxWidgets, motif) that allows you to rotate button and then stick it on a flying cube.

It was done a long time ago, it just never proved to be of any use. Look for the "Fresco" (this is the second Fresco toolkit, there was another one before; it used to be called "Berlin Project").

See these screenshots from 2000, from the Ottawa Linux Symposium:

http://www.fresco.org/screenshots.html

http://www.fresco.org/data/screenshots/xggi-xchat.png

The paper presented at the time is here:

http://www.fresco.org/docs/ols2000.ps.gz

On the commercial side, there were a number of windowing system that allowed this kind of rendering, they never got quite popular (for details, see the Wikipedia):

NeWS from Sun:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/NeWS.html

That link includes plenty of screenshots of the time. You probably can still get a working NeWS workstation if you get a SunOS 4.0 box on eBay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

And NextStep from Next. I do not know if the NextStep functionality made it into Cocoa when they changed Display Postscript for their new rendering engine though.

I agree that rotating buttons is fascinating, but I would claim that most GUI developers fail to even get GUIs in a passable state with their non-rotated versions. I wonder if WPF will popularize rotated buttons in the same way that early browsers popularized the blink tag.

Miguel.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft answers Linux IP infringement questions....Sort Of

miguel.de.icaza — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:28:56 GMT

RoyalSchrubber wrote:

You obviously haven't heard of WPF (and whole .net 3.0) thingy. And yes it's about 45.18 times better than anything that has Linux. X server basically does not allow any useful extensions and XGL/AIGLX/Compiz is going 100% in wrong direction with design, coz it really is not extending X Server in any useful way besides window animations.

Well, you clearly do not understand how these technologies work.

They work in the same way that virtualization of hardware works. Xgl and Aiglx can both be considered the "virtualization engines" (in the same way that say Xen, or Vmware might be) and they both expose a common API. "Compiz" is the application that uses this display-virtualization API technology and makes interesting things with them.

One of those things is doing window animations, the cube implementation, the wobbling, the uncovering and the special effects.

But the engine is there for anyone to use (Gtk+ and Mono's Windows.Forms use it to expose the "Alpha" channel).

You seem to be confusing apples and oranges, because WPF is an API that happens to have some cool effects while Xgl/Aiglx are display rendering engines.

Xgl and Aiglx can be used by other APIs to make something interesting out of them. Also, I would like to look at the research that you did to arrive at the number "45 times better", am sure you did an exhaustive review of memory usage, speed, technology adoption, portability, platform availability, standard compliance, ease of use and present and future market adoption. Then you computed the dot product and came up with the number 45.

Please share with us these components, as am sure your research was as deep as your understanding of Xgl.

Miguel.

Coffeehouse - Mono Project: Any serious work being done still?

miguel.de.icaza — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 01:21:08 GMT

Well, the status report is barely a couple of months old, so there is no reason to get worried about.

The best way of keeping track of the internals of the project is to subscribe to the mono-patches mailing list, which will give you an idea of what is going on.

Another option is to read the www.go-mono.com/monologue blog aggregator.

A few things we have been working on in the last few weeks:

A new IR represetation for the JIT, necessary to get the most out of many of optimization frameworks that we developed (HSSA and GNVPRE).
A new "tree mover" used in the JIT which reduces the complexity of the internal IR, this makes the job of the register allocator simpler. Code paths that produced horrible code with inlining (expansions that would turn into a 13 instruction monster are now reduced to 3 instructions, eliminating a lot of the spills and reloads that we generated).
Work on the infrastructural bits that support ASP.NET 2 (System.Configuration is a large beast).
A lot of bug fixing everywhere, we are trying to respond quickly to all the bugs that people are reporting to ensure that Mono keeps its good reputation as a development platform. Fix bugs, implements features later kind of thing.
We are still waiting on the Windows.Forms team to complete. The code is feature complete, and now the hard work of getting as many applications working has begun. It works reasonably well, and some contributors are developing the OSX driver, a bunch of themes (Themes are implemented in C#) and native integration with Gnome and KDE on Linux.
A new module that allows Mono to use the Linux kernel oprofile system.
Our new GC is still underway, and we still hope to have an experimental chunk of code checked in to SVN soon.
MonoDevelop just got support for built-in editing of Glade projects (the GUI designer that we use for Gtk#). Now instead of being an external tool, its integrated just like Winforms editing is integrated into VisualStudio.
A number of pieces from Google's summer of code are being integrated. The bug finger now is part of "Gendarme" a tool that we originally developed to assist us in sprinkling CAS support into mono, and now has evolved into a general purpose bug-finding, FxCop-like tool.

Its busy over in Mono land.

Miguel