Run the same MWF/Core.SWF on Windows too

[ris-work]

Is it possible to use the same SWF provider on Microsoft Windows (R) as well (for testing purposes on how it would look on FreeBSD/Linux) instead of the Microsoft one? I remember Mono having its own Mono.Windows.Forms running on MS Windows (R) too. On MS Win64 builds, it works with System.Windows.Forms for now, but I never referenced it myself through nuget (doesn't even exist as a transitive dependency - searching for System.Windows.Forms yields no results on the transitive dependencies list).

Please close this issue if the Windows port of Mono.SWF is abandoned long ago or is too much of effort, or if on Win64 also it uses the same backend (I might have messed up my MSBuild files). Thank you.

Regards,
Rishikeshan S/L.

[sancheolz]

Currently, there is a Microsoft-provided winforms implementation for net6+ that is only compatible with Windows. It can be run from the project https://github.com/DanielVanNoord/System.Windows.Forms/blob/master/SimpleTest.NetCore/SimpleTest.NetCore.csproj.

Additionally, there is a project https://github.com/DanielVanNoord/System.Windows.Forms/blob/master/SimpleTest/SimpleTest.csproj. It can be run on both Windows and Linux, and it uses the implementation from this repository.

[sancheolz]

in my experience, this winforms implementation and the Microsoft implementation often behave differently. Even this implementation on windows and linux is different. Although we are trying to fix this.

[ris-work]

Thank you for your response.

I see that the only difference between these two projects is the SDK type? (regarding MSBuild).
I have added Core.System.Windows.Forms from nuget and removed references to System.Windows.Forms (I do not consume SWF for the bulk of things, I use Eto.Forms do the heavy lifting but the only Unix-like native backend seems to be this - it directly talks X11 rather than GTK, although there is a separate GTK backend; I do use SWF calls myself to further customize).

It looks like the project I use is <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">. I think I may have messed up the build of my custom fork of Eto.Forms, will check there then, if the default behaviour is to use this implementation on Windows too!

[madewokherd]

Given that windowing will have to work differently on Win32 compared to X11, I don't think this will ever be a substitute for testing on Linux.

I'm also not sure that anyone really uses the Win32 backend.