Do any of you have any experience working with Qt and C# in Visual Studio? Is it at all possible/easy to use together? I've searched for C# bindings for Qt, but all projects seem to have been abandoned.
I'm doing an application which must be coded in C#, which also needs to be able to run on Ubuntu (with Mono). So, Qt was the first thing that came to mind.
The Qyoto project seems to be the way to go, and it seems to be still active. I don't have experience with it though.
Note that if the application is simple (i.e. doesn't use third-party components and no "hacks" to change behaviour), you can also give a simple WinForms application a try, which should run fine on Mono. And, well, if you don't actually need a GUI, you don't need anything except Mono. The Mono project itself, by the way, seems to favor Gtk# over Qt.
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thanks for reading this and helping.
I am comp sci intern, I mostly code winform applications using C# .net framework on windows. Recently, for job requirement, I have to make an application on Mac OS, which could be opened by just one doubleclicking the application. No script, command line or anything.
I research a bit about MONO and I successfully wrote an applescript application to do shell script and mono the Winform application. It does the works just like it does on windows, but the thing is it does the works very slowly on Mac. Therefore, I look more into Xamarin.Mac, and started learning to make a cocoa application.
However, here comes the question. If in the cocoa application, I still use the .net framework stuffs like List, Linq, System.IO like File.WriteAllLines instead of native cocoa stuff like NSMutableArray, NSFileManager, would it be slow just like MONO the Winform application?
Hypothetically, if I wrote pure objective-c in Xamarin comparing pure .net stuff to do the same job, would the .net one run slower than the objective-c one?
MonoMac was the framework (open source) to develop desktop OS X applications (32 bit). But it is now obsolete in favor of the commercial Xamarin.Mac platform (32 bit/64 bit).
If you are still a student, please get academic licenses from Xamarin,
http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-students/
The difficulty is that whether you can later find an employer that embraces Xamarin platforms. Good luck.
Any time you introduce an abstraction layer into your app it's going to be slower than native code. Whether or not that's a trade off you're comfortable with is up to you.
We want to write a client for an online service which should be available on as many platforms as possible. This question is about what programming language and framework we should use to create this client.
These platforms are required: Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad) and Android. The more the better.
For the mobile platforms there is Titanium Mobile. I haven't tried this thing yet, the website says you can develop for both iOS and Android using web skills such as Javascript. I don't know yet if you can deploy for both platforms using the SAME code. It would be great!
There is also Titanium Desktop but I don't like the idea that the complete source code is shared with the final application. Titanium does this for Mobile too but it isn't that easy to modify an app loaded via App Store.
So, what other way is there to create an application which runs on at least the three major desktop platforms? I thought c# with mono would be the way to go but I just realized that you need to use mono with MonoMac in order to publish it on the Mac App Store and use things like Growl. And since MonoMac is naturally only available for Macs, it's again not possible to deploy the mono app on all platforms without rewriting it for at least the Mac. And it would be nice if the app looks "native" on all platforms. Gtk# just does not look good on a Mac. It's "okay" on Windows and great on Linux.
I know we could use Objective-C for iOS and Mac, Java for Android, C#.net for Windows and C#.mono for Linux but the main point is that we don't want to write the same app in a lot of different languages. That would make development and maintenance really hard.
And we prefer languages with C-style syntax which are much easier to learn for us PHP web developers. Btw: We dislike Air and I'm not sure about Java since I never used it but it also does not look "native" and it feels kinda slow.
Edit:
Just a note: It wouldn't be a problem to create an own form for each platform if at least the remaining code is the same. Is it possible to use MonoMac, Gtk# and Win Forums in the same C# application? And I'd prefer C# over C++ as I have no skills in C++, so I first need to check how hard it is to write with Qt.
Another note: We don't plan to spend much money and because we need to pay Apples Developer Programs we want to use free or cheap technology. Preferable Open Source.
Just use C# for all of the above.
The mono project will cover Mac and Linux, with monodroid your android requirements are covered and monotouch will take care of iPod/iPad/iPhone.
In regards to UI - mono has full support for the System.Windows.Forms namespace, so you don't have to use GTK# if you don't want to.
I don't think I need to mention windows support ;)
If you really want to support all those platforms from a single application, your best bet will be to create a web application. With HTML5, such an application can even be cached on the device and used when no connection is available. Also, that strategy would make it feasible to customize the UI based on the device running the app.
You will not have good luck if you set out to build a single native app that runs on Android and iOS, let alone all the other platforms you mentioned. The reason that they're different platforms rather than the same is that they're, well, different. They have different capabilities, run on different hardware, are built with different languages, employ different application models with different user interfaces, and have audiences with different expectations.
The best solution I've come across over the years is Qt SDK.
Great support for all major platforms, Symbian, OS X, Linux flavors, Windows, Windows CE (mobile), Android and iOS partial support and etc.
Its base is C++ but bindings for almost every language (like C#) is available. Lots of help and support is also covered.
The core Qt libs are very fast and extensive, And the whole KDE desktop (of Linux) is done with it. Famous software like VLC and VirtualBox are done in Qt.
Another relatively new way of doing cross-platform development is to use the open source Eto.Forms, which allows you to have one UI codebase target each platform's native toolkit. It is a UI abstraction layer that can target GTK#, MonoMac/OSX, WinForms, and WPF.
There is also an iOS port in the works.
Java sounds like the best fit. It is cross-platform, easy to understand, has a huge userbase and android is based on it.
Depending if you need an offline interaction mode, it sounds like you should develop a web application. You can develop a mobile version and a desktop version and thus support all the of the above platforms. Look at youtube's application for Iphone, it retains the same functionality as the the iphone app but is purely html. Furthermore, html5 capable browsers could also have the ability to run offline.
Crazy as it sounds, check out Flash/Flex - it is cross platform, code once, run everywhere ,now compiles down to native code on e.g. Android and iOS and the 10.1 player is shipping all over. I had to solve exactly this problem and when Flash Builder Burrito catered for mobile after working with it for a while I have switching from C#/Flash hybrid to Flash only for clients. (Our backend is C#/Node/C++, etc).
Depending on your timelines and needs it is something look into.
Some random links to peruse:
Blog post about performance and video to single app multi device
Developing flash and flex applications
I'm thinking of developing a desktop app in C#. Although windows will be my main target, later I'll try and run the app in MacOS X and linux. Can I do this today, in a simple way?
I'm aware of the mono project, but it is not clear to me if I can do this in a simple way.
Also, what is the relation between WPF and Silverlight? AFAIK Silverlight follows a plugin model much like Flash or Java. Can I develop my desktop app with Silverlight and deploy it on windows, linux and os x without much changes?
Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
The Mono project does not support .Net 3 and WPF yet, and it will probably been some time before that happens.
Silverlight might be sufficient for your needs.
As of Silverlight 3.0 you can run Silverlight outside the browser, even create a shortcut to it on the desktop.
Last I heard, the Mono project has no plans to implement WPF, however they are working on other .NET 3.5 features, especially LINQ and ASP.NET MVC. The problem with implementing WPF in Mono (beyond the size and complexity of the API) is that on Windows it uses DirectX for rendering, so an implementation for Mono would need to use OpenGL. Definitely not a trivial undertaking.
WPF is used to build desktop applications for Windows only. Currently no other platforms are supported. If cross-platform support is a must, you can create a browser-based application and use Silverlight. Silverlight runs applications in the browser, though, so you cannot make a "desktop" application using that.
Mono is working hard to make sure that Silverlight runs cross platform (as mentioned on one of the stack overflow podcasts). So that seems to be a good way to go.
I want to know how can I build UIs like skype using standard .Net/C#. Is it possible at all?
Thanks
You can use Windows Presentation Foundation to build more stylish GUIs than Windows Forms. It's pretty difficult to move from Forms to WPF. You usually need a good design tool, like Expression Blend.
AFAIK skype was built using Qt4, it's rather easy to build custom gui widgets, check
C++ GUI Programming with Qt4, 2nd Edition and this tutorial.
P.S. check this to see how to build qt4 on windows using MSVC 2008.
It might be possible to build such an UI using Windows Forms, but only with a lot of custom control code or a really good component suite. But as Chris said, WPF should be the tool of your choice when you want to use .NET.
Qt4 is a really powerful C++ framework, also powering apps like Google Earth. The Qt SDK, inclduing everything you need to get started (Compiler, IDE, documentation), can be obtained here. It's licensed (among others) under the LGPL.
Windows Presentation Foundation will give you the most flexibility, but it can be hard to use. An alternative to this is Sliverlight - Version 3 is going to be capable of being used outside of the browser (similar to Adobe Air), and in some ways provides an easier development experience. You might want to consider using some third party controls to give you access to nice functionality that you wouldn't get out of box.
To my acknowledge Skype is build with Delphi an a set of third party tools, so it for sure can be done without WPF.
Take a look at the components from DevExpress or TMS.
Background: I've decided to teach myself C# through WPF, and I'm writing a small application that needs to get a list of Start Menu shortcuts and their targets and store them. Basically, I'm trying to take all the shortcuts and put their target applications' paths into memory. However, I've run into a problem trying to read Windows Installer shortcuts (the ones that point to something like C:\Windows\Installer\{90120000-0030-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}\wordicon.exe -- Microsoft Office is a good example of this). I did some research and it seems that Windows uses some behind-the-scenes magic involving the Registry to find the actual location of the file.
Question: How can I get the actual target of these Windows Installer shortcuts in C#? A lot of sources I've found point me to the IShellLink interface, but I don't know how to use it with C#. I'd prefer to use Windows API calls (or, even better, a .NET library) instead of manually looking through the Registry, but I'll take any guidance on the issue.
After doing more research, I found an easy answer here. It's basically using a combination of the MsiGetShortcutTarget and MsiGetComponentPath functions of msi.dll.
I'm afraid IShellLink IS the Windows API for using shell links! The Shell API is heavily COM-based.
But the good news is that COM interop works very well in .NET. This site is usually a very good resource:
http://www.pinvoke.net/default.aspx/Interfaces/IShellLinkA.html