gtk-databindings work blog and ramblings

Don’t get me wrong, I actually like designing in stetic if I use classic widgets… But its design and internals scare the s*** out of me as I work with custom widgets 99% of time whenever I only think about working with it.

First the good… and why stetic is really great
1) Designing complex widgets, kudos and a beer keg
2) Really sensible interface and nice layout, again kudos

But why is stetic completely unusable for me?
(Which is completely different than my opinion about the rest of the Monodevelop. Monodevelop is in my eyes best IDE since sliced bread was invented and all my kudos with additional beer keg to developers.)
1) objects.xml overrides .Net attributes. This is not serious, actualy quite simple to correct
… now the really bad things (but knowing how much work it would take to fix this, I know why everyone is avoiding this like a plague. There is no time which is probably the first reason. The second reason is providing remoting service which can communicate all functionalities to IDE and back. Major work
2) any usage of class outside of gtk lib. you either get a wrapper with base class inside… uaaaaahhh. Or you get even worse result, stetic simply decides base widget has 0,0 size and widget disappears into nothing. Even wrapper approach is bad (for example, you set property value and there is no visual feedback on the form)
3) works trough cecil for everything outside base gtk-sharp library, which CAN’T invoke your widget and you end up with some wrapper c*** again.
4) No custom property designers

Number 1 probably derives from the fact that original designer didn’t even look at .Net framework but rather reinvented the whole wheel completely against .Net. Well, actual problem is just the priority where description is first taken. It should be attributes not xml. xml should be used for possible additional information. No more than 1 hour of work.

Now… 2, 3 and 4 all derive from the same problem. .Net can’t unload assembly. So what to do… For real soluion? Nope, there is no time. But providing simple but crippled solution… Yep more than possible. Personally, I don’t even see any crippling. And neither has anyone I talked to about this.

About patch

Well if one can’t unload assembly… He can unload IDE. But if references are only made to libraries referenced from GAC? Those can’t get recompiled, those can’t change. so worst case scenario is MD reload when I want to edit that library (or rather work on it as separate user in my case). Which is really rare.

Ok, so… rather than constantly bitching for next few years, I started patching stetic to fill my needs.

and goal 1 is achieved. Stetic now shows real widgets instead of fakes. and even more… they are live as seen here

Here is my DateEntry inside of stetic (for information… this is not combo box. It is derived from DrawingArea)

And these are properties. One widget has them set on false, one on true. Basically, you see what you design. Hell, you can even edit value if you want and it is stored back to stetic.

What is left to do?

Second step is to figure out which references are GAC based and pass only those to stetic instead of hardlinking as I did to be able to test invokation. This shouldn’t take long.

And last 3rd step is checking on solution load if solution is already loaded and… if it is simply exit monodevelop with exit code and rerun from script with new solution. This might take more time.

Bah, I know solution is far from perfect… but losing 3-4 seconds per project change instead of losing time working with invisible forms or forms without feedback? I don’t see the problem.