I want to build a rather complicated GUI app on the .Net framework. The app will have the following graphical capabilities:
Plotting/updating realtime data
Allow manual (using mouse) drawing/dragging/editing of lines etc on a plot
Allow selecting of graphical objects/shapes on a plot and drag/drirop to a new location on the plot
Ideally, I would like to use VS to do my initial development, because the VSIDE is (understandably) much more sophisticated than the monodevelop tools. However, I will be running the application and maintaining the codebase (once the development phase is completed), on Linux, using monodevelop.
It is important for this reason, that I make sure that I do not use any .Net components that have not yet been ported over to mono.
Given the graphical functional requirements above, I would like to know if I can expect to be able to develop such an app on Windows and then port to monodevelop?.
I am aware that components like WPF have not been ported to mono, so are there any other .Net GUI components (available on mono) that I can use in my application (to make the port possible)?
From a past experience start with a Windows Forms plain app. If you want the port to be as clean as possible forget about complex UI components, you can always use your custom controls but check third-party ones you use don't call Win32 API directly. That you can do it within Visual Studio (check this plugin for more productivity) but I want to warn you about two things:
Interfaces built with Visual Studio (WinForms) when running on Linux look awful.
If you want a clean UI take a look at Gtk#
Related
Context: I am looking for examples of popular applications that use WPF for their UI.
With Windows 8 and Windows 10, certain parts of the OS got a new 'look-and-feel', for example:
The system settings dialog
The taskbar and the start menu
The calculator app
The task manager
Do those or any other Windows system applications use WPF for their UI?
This question already provides a list of existing applications that use WPF: What real world WPF applications are out there?. However, I would like to know if there are any builtin Windows system applications that use WPF.
None of those applications use WPF. Instead they use UWP, which was inspired by WPF, but is quite a different framework underneath.
There are WPF applications in many default Windows installations, though. For example, the PowerShell ISE is one.
You could try Snooping them to find out - It's not been updated for several years but I tried it on a splinter new 4.6 app I'm developing and it's detecting it and works fine. Whatever it can detect is certainly a WPF app - the inverse is not true however.
That being said it did not detect calculator or task manager for me.
I have .Net Winform project(c#) working in windows.Now,i want to do same project, to work as OSX App in Mac. As per my understanding Microsoft recently launched Visual studio for Mac preview and also it support OSX app development using Xamarin.Mac and also it support .Netcore .
Instead of creating Osx app from scratch,i need to reuse the code which is available in .net winform project.
can i develop UI application using .netcore project? I think .netframework and .netcore more or less same.can i port .netframework to .netcore project and create osx app ?
or
can i use xamarin.mac and reuse the .netframework c# code to create osx app?
I am new to this,so kindly suggest the best way to create OSX app using Visual studio for Mac preview. (Basically i need Tabel view,form controls and graph(there i use zedgraph).Is these view are available here.
In general, the "standard" way of developing cross platform applications is to separate as much of your logic as possible into shared libraries of some type and create "thin" UIs specific to each platform.
Depending on your need, you could easily make that shared code netstandard/PCL/etc compatible and share between platforms or just recompile the project in each solution.
NSTableView will likely solve your needs, but expect it to be significantly more primitive that what you are used to on Windows. Graph controls don't come built in, so you'll need to find a vendor that ships Cocoa controls or draw them yourself.
Here is the quickstart documentation.
Xamarin.Forms support for macOS is coming in the future, currently earmarked for Q2 this year.
Windows.Forms library contain many bugs which effectively prevent applications from working. WinForms Designer is unable to put WebBrowser control on form. NotifyIcon class doesn't work under LXDE (see the bugtracker of KeePass). Clipboard class is incompatible with default manager of Calculate Linux. Drag and Drop have problems in DockPanelSuite. WinForms Designer is not finished because of opacity problems. WPF was never implemented and no plans to do it.
And mono team says "we don't want to develop WinForms, because this is old technology."
How should one port desktop C# application from Windows to Linux? Rewriting it with Gtk# seems to be too hard...
What is easier - to fix mono WinForms, to implement WPF, or to rewrite all applications in the world to Gtk# ?
As you have already found out Mono WinForms implementation is suitable only for very simple applications. Take a look at "Cross-Platform Desktop UIs" blog post from Xamarin employee Mike James who summarizes available solutions:
Traditional approach
WPF or WinForms frontend on Windows, GTK# frontend on Linux and Xamarin.Mac on Mac OS X. IMO this is the best way to go and it may be easier than it looks if you have correctly separated business and presentation layers in your app.
XWT
XWT toolkit uses the same API and provides native look on all platforms but only a limited subset of components is implemented. Its usability for your projects depends on what components you really need.
HTML frontend
Create HTML frontend using simple WebView component or Awesomium HTML UI Engine. This may be a viable option in some cases but I am not sure whether it is possible to implement systray icons with this approach.
QTSHARP
Open source project which aims to implement .NET bindings for multiplatform QT toolkit. I have never tried it but according to project website it seems to be in early stage and currently tested only on Windows.
BTW I am currently using WinForms for Pkcs11Admin application but I plan to use traditional approach as soon as I hit a blocker bug on any of the supported platforms.
Is there any way I can invoke White UI Automation tool from Java?
I already have a Java framework with me and now I need to handle some Silverlight application (which is legacy code and the developer has not made it scriptable). I don't want to maintain a separate workspace/technology for this. Is there any way I can call White UI or the underlying Windows UI Automation from within my Java code?
Perhaps IKVM would work? I haven't used it before, but it looks like it allows you to run Java code that can directly access .NET assemblies.
So, sounds like it might be a way to use both White and your Java test framework at the same time.
There's an interesting tutorial here (see the section Developing a .NET application in Java):
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ikvm/index.php?title=Tutorial
And the main IKVM website is at ikvm.net
I am in the process of recommending an UI automation tool for a windows based WPF application in a company
Which targets wide range of customers . The Application lives on a layer of WCF services for getting
The data. The company is already having a small VBScript framework written specifically for Test Complete
and is really not robust, Hence I am lookout for a right tool, where we could reuse the scripts or
Improve the already existing tool. Any ideas are welcome.
I have looked at Microsoft UI Automation, Project White, UIA Verify and Ranorex. Each one of them
Is having a feature lack.
I was able to go through the process of Microsoft UI Automation. I am still in the process of understanding how it works
with WPF, since it is totally dependent on Automation IDS.
Our application is huge and is not written with this in mind. All the code either does not implement
Automation ID property or Name property which is very much essential for object identification in the visual tree
in tools like UISpy and VisualUIAVerify.
What I am looking in specific are the following. Please give ratings to each of these
1) Recording : Recording , play back and automatic execution of test scripts and generate a report.
2) Dependencies : Minimal Dependencies(.NET frameworks, API modules , SDK Versions etc..)
3) )Code Generation : Code Generation of test scripts from Templates, Macros and Recording.
4)Object Name Mapping: Avoid explicit usage of Automation IDS and screen corrdinates, if they use, does it support any tools which would take XAML Files and insert Automation IDS into it and also avoid Problems With duplicate Automation IDS.
5) Events: Any Events and call backs that the user(tester) may receive if the GUI has undergone any changes
and how the scripts would change in this Case.
6) Support : Support for different scripting languages and easy Code conversions(C#, VBScript, Python.. etc)
7) Fast and Reliable: Easy and fast accessibility of GUI elements for manipulation( Like support to xml dom, Json.. etc), navigation, code duplication replacement tasks for changes in UI and easy configuration(xml, ini files)
8)Code Converters: the tester writes code in vbscript and developer could simply convert it into c# for embedding them into any stand alone framework if need be).
9)Custom controls: Support for custom controls and object mapping. If you have a custom object that behaves like one of standard controls. are you able to map (tell the test tool that the custom control behaves like the standard) control? Does it support all the standard controls methods? Can you add the custom control to it’s own class of control?
10)Reports: Should be able to execute multiple tests at once and generate a report similar to VisualUIAVerify.
Visual Studio 2010 Coded UI Tests
You can use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio 2010 Premium to create automated tests of the user interface known as coded UI tests. These tests provide functional testing of the user interface and validation of user interface controls.
I am using Coded UI Tests to automate tests of a WPF application built on the MVVM pattern. The record/playback features of the tool are impressive, generating really nice models. For large suites, the advice is to tear apart the generated code, structuring and extending it for your own purposes.
I recommend Visual UIA Verify to assist viewing the automation structure of your application while developing and debugging.
Have you tried AutomatedQA testcomplete
http://www.automatedqa.com/products/testcomplete/