WX.Net / News: Recent posts

The originally goal of the wx.NET project has been to wrap the famous wxWidgets framework. Therefore, classes and enumerations bear names as similar to their origins in wxWidgets as possible. As a consequence, the names of classes and enumerations contratict widely accepted conventions in .NET. The coming release will try to change this as far as possible. The MS tool for .NET code analysis FxCop is currently used to guide this process. However, current users of wx.NET will have to prepare for releases with significantly changed names for style flags etc. I recently changed the name of the project from wx.NET to WX.Net (correct Pascal spelling) to stress the purpose to make WX.Net more .Net..

The Windows binary wx-c-0-9-0-1.dll of release 0.9.0.1 has unfortunately been built in debug mode. Additionally, I missed to copy the .NET documentation wx.NET.XML into the release. Please apologize any inconvenience. This distribution also contains a fix to the wrapping of the accelerator table that caused access violations. Added tool getwxtext.exe to get gettext PO files translating enumerations, and class names.

The new file release 0.91 is out. It consists of one ZIP archive containing all sources and binaries for the Windows 32Bit platform and the Linux/GTK+ 2.0 platform.

New versions of wx.NET will not any longer support the Portable.NET framework. Reason: Newer code makes heavy use of gernics and other extensions that are common to the .NET world since 2005 but not supported by PNET.

wx.NET will get a new build system. This is planned to support the old premake meta-make options since this package is extended continiously. However, I need something to automize installation as well as the generation of fie distributions. File distributions will be published using a private (unpublished) private key signature. So, you can trust them as far as you trust me. The old keyfile from the CVS distribution, whose private key is not really private, will be retained to sign up development versions. The native DLL wx-c.dll will be renamed in file distributions. Version info will be added. So, users can install this safely in the systems32 directory. Once, these changes are completed, wx.NET will change its status to "stable".

DateTimeEdit uses MaskedEdit to enable localized input of date time structs. Refer to the control.exe sample. This is a unique implementation.
TaskBarIcon is a wrapper of the corresponding wxWidgets class originally contributed by Jacek Trublajewicz.

wx.NET get full support of the STC control from wxWidgets contributions including its own sample program.
Additionally, wx.NET features a masked edit control. Refer to the "controls.exe" sample.

wx.NET get full support of the STC control from wxWidgets contributions including its own sample program.
Additionally, wx.NET features a masked edit control. Refer to the "controls.exe" sample.

Further changes to the names of classes: wx.NET introduces the new namespaces wx.Archive, wx.DataAccess, wx.FileSys, wx.GridCtrl, wx.Html, and wx.StyledText. The number of available classes became far to large to be put in only one single namespace.

wxWidgets uses bit vectors to configure windows on creation, the so-called styles. wx.NET used to provide such style flags as integer constants. These constants had the same name as their counterparts in C++.
wx.NET now makes a move to exploit the opportunities of the .NET framework. Styles for windows and sizers are now enumerations with attribute [Flags]. This eases use of wx.NET for those developers working with Visual Studio's IntelliSence and for those that do not use the C++ original of wxWidgets. Unfortunately, existing code for wx.NET needs to be ported.

Release 2.8.0 has been linked with wxWidgets 2.6.4. Since then, the project switched to test only with the most current version of wxWidgets release 2.8.

The new file release 0.8.0 is rolling out. It contains several fixes, a new help browser, and full unicode support.

The wx.NET project web page now presents in http://wxnet.sourceforge.net/apiref/ the new API documentation generated by doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org).

Please visit the wx.NET home page at http://wxnet.sf.net/ for the latest news about this project. And also be sure to join the wx-users mailing list!

The initial release of wx.NET, a .NET wrapper for the popular wxWindows library, is now available on SourceForge. Tested with .NET, Mono, and portable.NET, wx.NET brings a truly portable GUI toolkit to .NET everywhere!