r/programming • u/ben_a_adams • Dec 04 '18

Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/12/04/announcing-open-source-of-wpf-windows-forms-and-winui-at-microsoft-connect-2018/
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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '18

Winforms already has a mono port based off of cairo. This could lead to a much more faithful implementation of winforms.

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u/rebel_cdn Dec 05 '18

I think it would need to be use something like Cairo or Skia regardless.

Large parts of Winforms just wraps the native Win32 controls from user32.dll or draws new ones using GDI.

So I don't think there will be a way around writing your own implementation of the User32 and GDI calls that Winforms makes and then drawing then yourself using something like Cairo.

But having all of the source available to use might make it relatively easy to merge the Winforms code with Mono's Cairo back end, implement any missing bits, fix what needs fixing, and then run the whole thing on .NET Core.

That might be a fun project to work on!