Monodevelop & Winforms-references

Servus and greetings from Germany!

I recently started to use Mono together with Monodevelop (everything from the official repos).
Unfortunately I cannot compile Mono-/.Net-Applications by myself although I’m able to run precompiled ones.
Basically I don’t get the Winforms to work - neither in Monodevelop (I added the appropriate reference) nor on the commandline.


# mcs Main.cs /r:System.Windows.Forms.dll /r:System.Drawing.dll
# Main.cs(12,25): error CS0103: The name `Windows' does not exist in the current context

The absolute path to the dlls doesn’t work either.

To get Mono working I only exported MONO_PATH - don’t know whether this was enough?

I know several people will suggest to use GTK#^^. I am certainly aware of that possibility, however, I will need those Winfoms for my study. So in that case, GTK is not an option for me…

Thanks in advance,
Jens

Well, i’ve got a “solution”. I can’t really explain what happened, but after a few other “thoughtful” but unsuccessful attemps, I’ve installed everything named “mono” and it worked…
I guess there was something in “mono-complete” I missed before but nothing indicated that this particular package was necessary. In my opinion it installed a lot of bindings-stuff I don’t actually need…well anyway.

I had a similar problem while trying to compile Open-dental (open-dent.com). Only after having selected all mono* pkgs I could do that. Though to this day I’m not sure which are the only one required :-). Still I don’t care that much… (it’s just several megs of hdd space wasted).

Yep. Probably some dependencies mixed up.

That’s good to know.

How do you go about doing things in Winforms in Monodevelop?

Well, it isn’t that comfortable to code compared to GTK#/monodevelop or VisualStudio. You do it either with an external Designer, e.g. mwf (which is unfortunately rather unstable) or you type them all by yourself.
Because that is, I switched to GTK#. The Visual Designer in Monodevel works flawlessly.
I have to admit, I didn’t get gtk# running with Windows yet, but it isn’t really neccessary for my purposes anymore.

So long.

Is that (GTK#) via Stetic?

What I don’t like is that Stetic is (was? haven’t tried Monodevelop 2.0 yet) only available for C#. VB doesn’t have any designer gui available.

So it looks like the Winforms(Windows)/GTK#(Linux)/#Cocoa(Mac) is the place where Mono falter at being cross-platform.

Hm…whatever Stetic is (sry^^).
From my experience I can tell you, that the following is at least working with:

Winforms : Win, Linux, Mac;
GTK# : Linux, Mac (is “supposed” to work with Windows too…)
Cocoa# Mac only;

Edit: Oh, Stetic is the Visual Designer for gtk#. I didn’t know, because they don’t call it that way anymore since it is integrated into Monodevelop. The Add-Ins just calls it “GTK# Visual Designer”.
I just created a VB Project for you - and you are right: There is still no Stetic for VB.

Oh, I didn’t think Winforms would be cross-platform with Linux and Mac and didn’t know if GTK# would work with Mac.