From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 20388 invoked by alias); 18 Nov 2003 20:45:47 -0000 Mailing-List: contact xconq7-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: xconq7-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 20367 invoked from network); 18 Nov 2003 20:45:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO outbound28-2.lax.untd.com) (64.136.28.160) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 18 Nov 2003 20:45:45 -0000 Received: (qmail 17706 invoked from network); 18 Nov 2003 20:45:43 -0000 Received: from 66-52-247-189.sttl.dial.netzero.com (HELO vangogh) (66.52.247.189) by smtp02.lax.untd.com with SMTP; 18 Nov 2003 20:45:43 -0000 From: "Brandon J. Van Every" To: "xconq" Subject: RE: Mono, anyone? Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 21:01:00 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal In-reply-to: <1069180897.29637.102436.camel@odysseus.peterslan> Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 X-SW-Source: 2003/txt/msg00775.txt.bz2 Lincoln Peters wrote: > > Has anyone considered taking advantage of Ximian's (Novell's?) Mono > project? Have you? I can think of a zillion things Xconq *could* have in it... but I concentrate on the ones I'm fully willing to implement myself. No harm in asking if someone else is also interested in Mono, but my point is you have to be the one to lead the effort for that sort of thing. > * Allow Xconq to talk to a other application. This may > initially sound > silly, but imagine how much easier it might be to play games such as > bellum.g if you could use a spreadsheet to represent various > aspects of > your empire (particularly such things as supply of 'c') using charts. > It might not be quite so bad for Xconq to behave (to some extent) like > an office application. What I *have* considered, is writing the Windows UI in C# and .NET. I'm a .NET nunce, I don't know what its GUI features are. Maybe it has some kind of applicable "spreadsheet form." Thanks for reminding me that right-click popups won't solve all UI problems, I'll need a National Budget screen somewhere. If I go the C# .NET route, then I'll simply leave it to others to worry about porting it to Mono. But one thing I've discovered, that I didn't realize before, is that C# is not exactly a good language for interoping with C directly. You have to create DLLs and do all this marshalling stuff, it's a tedious function-by-function job. Either that or wrap stuff up in Managed C++. Neither would be so bad if the C was legacy code awaiting conversion to something more modern, but I expect it will be a live target for some time. I have no interest in chasing the C coders' tails with my manual labor. So today, I'm looking at Python / C interop. Possibly a "make this more OO" effort needs to precede C# .NET efforts. Once I have a higher level construct summarizing the Xconq interactions, use that to bridge to C#. NET. This is like the idea of wrapping stuff up with Managed C++, except I'm wrapping stuff up with Python. And then accepting possibly some more difficulty implementing the interop bridge. Or there's Door #3: finding a Python GUI that has the right-click popup and spreadsheet tables I need. Another thing I'll be looking at today. But my concern is there's probably no RAD tool at the same level of quality as C# .NET in the Python world. I want to bang out GUIs quickly, not futz manually. Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA 20% of the world is real. 80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.