Just a quick note. Just finished the Gtk# 2.7.1 Installer for .NET Framework Runtime 1.1. Like its older brother (the SDK one) it includes GNOME 2.12 and GTK+ 2.8. The biggest difference is that this one is as light as I could make it -- a single exe file that weights under 15 MB. This is possible because it does not include header files and development libraries, nor does it include samples or glade-2.exe (the GTK GUI designer tool).
Starting Monday, I will begin working on the mono project Wiki trying to clarify the difference between all the installers I have been putting out lately and the great timely ones that Novell puts out.
The last thing I want to point out, is that the Windows folks will probably be quite in synch with the technologies that will be available once SUSE 10.1 gets released. This is no coincidence, I was burning all of this midnight oil because I want it for all of us to get ready for the multi-platform goodness that mono 1.2 will achieve.
Along those lines, I have been playing with the idea of creating a simple Gnome# application that will be wizard (druid) driven so that developers can create, installers for their mono/.NET Gtk# applications with relative ease. Even though it will initially generate Inno Setup *.iss files, the community will be able to contribute by adding other installer formats and build systems. In the end, it could even create makefiles (nmake and gmake), NAnt files, auto* tools files (*.am, *.in) and maybe even package in archives like zip, gz and/or bz2. The app will run cross platform (for sure Windows and Linux -- will see about Mac afterward) and the output it produces will be aimed at distributing your applications in a platform optimized way. This mean creating Start Menu shortcuts for your Windows deployment target and Gnome menu and application registration for Linux.
Posted by martinf at January 21, 2006 01:18 PMGreat job!
From an application developer's perspective, I always wondered how to deploy a Gtk# application properly on Windows. That is, given just the MS .NET framework is installed, how to combine my application with Gtk# for Windows (.NET runtime) so the hassles for the users are minimized.
So far, I only succeeded running Gtk# applications under Windows by opening a cmd.exe and starting mono explicitly with the program. It always failed for the normal .NET runtime, like only Mono could find the installed Gtk# libraries.
Long talk, short question: Can I just install the new Gtk# for .NET runtime installer and then start my program.exe from any directory? Or do I need special environment variables set, special directory layout, or anything else? :-)
Thanks for the great work!
Sebastian