Windows Forms
From Free net encyclopedia
Microsoft Windows Forms is the name given to the GUI portion of the Microsoft .NET development framework, providing access to the native Windows widgets by wrapping the existing Win32 API in managed code. While it is seen as a replacement for the earlier and more complex [[C++]] based Microsoft Foundation Classes, it does not offer comparable features such as the Model View Controller "Document/View" architecture. "Document/View" has been replaced with the "MDI (Multiple Document Interface)" construct.
The implementation exists within the .NET Framework namespace System.Windows.Forms and tries to correctly theme itself on Windows XP. There are, however, significant issues with this support regarding tab sheets and controls placed on these sheets.
The Mono development platform tried several approaches for Windows Forms support. Early versions tried to implement Windows Forms as a wrapper for the Win32 API by using the Wine implementation of the API. Later, this functionality was removed from Mono in favor of a fully managed implementation. Currently a new Windows Forms library, where the widgets are rewritten in managed code and drawn using GDI+, is under active development.
Other GUI toolkits for .NET include
- Gtk#: wrapper for the [[GTK+]] toolkit.
- VCL.NET: Borland's wrapper for the Win32 widgets, provided as part of Delphi.NET.
- DotGNU: draws the widgets itself.
- wx.net: wrapper around wxWidgets, which is a wrapper around the native widgets of multiple operating systems