DockPanel Suite Tip #5: We Could Go Mono

DockPanel Suite was designed for Windows. Its original author and later contributors do not yet port it to Mono. However, so many people including me would like to have a Mono friendly DPS, then how can we achieve that?

A full port to Mono requires us to get rid of all Win32 PInvoke, but unless someone who masters Windows/Linux/DPS comes I bet it is not likely that we see a full port.

I chose the easy way to sacrifice certain features. For example, if we disable end user drag and drop, all such PInvoke parts can be safely commented out. Is that all I need? Yes, my applications at this moment do not need any drag and drop, so why not use this lite version?

I now happily see the applications run fine on Mono (well, one infinite loop issue needs to be worked around though). So do you plan to use such a lite version?

The lite version of source code is available here, http://code.google.com/p/sharpsnmplib/source/browse/#hg%2FWinFormsUI. You can check out the entire WinFormsUI folder and analyze it to see what changes I’ve made.

Figure 1: DockPanel Suite on Mono.

(Updated: Now I become a maintainer of DockPanel Suite. The latest DPS can be found at https://github.com/dockpanelsuite/dockpanelsuite, which contains this patch and many other useful patches.)

(Updated again: Due to Mono WinForms limitations, DockPanel Suite on Mono is provided as it is and will not be actively maintained. Please consider native UI frameworks such as GTK# on Linux, and Xamarin.Mac on macOS.)