Quick video tutorial (not mine) for using the GTK# GUI RAD:


I started messing with GTK# because I wanted to make a utility for the Mac, and didn't want to have resort to the mess that xibless hacking is for me right now
(http://catchingmono.blogspot.com/search/label/xibless), so I figured I'd look at the GUI RAD for GTK# that comes with Xamarin Studio. I flailed away for a little while, and was able to make most everything I wanted. Then I found the video, above, from 2012, which seems to hold up well. It's really that easy.

With the caveat that I haven't tried to package for anonymous end users, the GTK# GUI RAD is very good. It's occasionally quirky, and has its foibles (wait, if I fill up my layout table with rows, my vbox will pull the statusbar off of the bottom of the window?), but it's very VB6-IDE-esque, which is high praise. Actually, because of the layout managers, it's much better than the pixel-perfect (aka, "Not resizable") UIs VB6 made so easily.

And as an added bonus, if you use the download on this page: http://www.mono-project.com/download/#download-win ... you can run this just as well on Windows as on OS X. And if you grab Xamarin Studio from there, it doesn't look like it downloads all the Android cruft with it like it would from the official Xamarin download page. Here, I *think* you just get the "free" project types. Nice.

I'll attach a simplistic shot, just for fun. Very fast, and I think the worst case is that you tell your would-be utility users that they have to install Mono (or, on Windows, .NET 4.5) and GTK#. I don't think I'd purposefully target Windows-first with this (Visual Studio's GUI RAD is just as good, and is, ultimately, more robust), but I could see making a Mac app in GTK# and releasing Windows and Linux bins just for fun, since they're sitting there.

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