mono/web/winforms

* System.Windows.Forms

	System.Windows.Forms eventually will support multiple
	toolkits.  Ximian will be delivering a product that will allow
	for System.Windows.Forms applications to integrate with GNOME
	through Gtk and MacOS X using Cocoa.

	There are no current plans to support embedded devices, but
	Gtk/FrameBuffer is an option.  If you have suggestions or
	recommendations, please let us <a
	href="mailto:[email protected]">let us know</a>

* Contributing

	Currently Ximian developers are busy making our JIT engine
	feature complete, and dealing with the low-level details of
	the Mono runtime.

	If you are interested in contributing, you can start stubbing
	out classes and providing enumerations.  That will help us
	significantly when we start working on the actual bindings.  

	Christian Meyer is currently organizing this effort.

* System.Drawing

	Using existing libraries to implement some of the functionality required

	<ul>
		* gdk-pixbuf is a generic image loader that loads an image
		  and leaves it into an RGB buffer.  It hides all the details
		  about what image file format is being loaded.

		* Libart is a general framework for rendering RGB/RGBA
		  buffers into RGB buffers and rendering postscript-like paths into
		  RGB/RGBA buffers.
	</ul>

	We want to use gdk-pixbuf as the image loader for the image
	classes, and then we need operations to render that into the
	windowing system (Gtk+, MacOS, etc).  But notice how there is
	very little dependnecies in Gdk-pixbuf on gtk, and libart has
	none.

	They are pretty independent from a windowing system
	(gdk-pixbuf comes with some "helper" routines for rendering
	data into a pixmap and to load pixmaps into RGB buffers).

	A few things to keep in mind:
	
	<ul>
	
		* gdk-pixbuf can be used to load images for Gtk+,
		  MacOS X and Windows, it should be pretty portable,
		  although we might need in the future to back-port
		  some new features from Gtk head. 

		* Libart is probably only going to be used with X11,
		  as the MacOS X provides the same features in Quartz,
		  and Win32 *probably* has that in GDI+.  If not, we
		  should use libart in Win32 as well (or for older
		  Windows systems).
	</ul>

* Directory Layout

        System.Drawing  (assembly directory)
                System.Drawing.Blah
                        Common code for "Blah"
                        Stubs for "Blah" to ease ports.

                Gtk
                        System.Drawing.Blah.
                                Gtk ports of "System.Drawing.Blah"
                MacOS
                        System.Drawing.Blah
                                MacOS ports of "System.Drawing.Blah"
                Win32
                        System.Drawing.Blah
                                Win32 ports of "System.Drawing.Blah"

	Then we use nant targets to include/exclude the right set of
	files to create the assembly.

* Open questions:

	I believe that the graphics contexts that are used to render
	can accept either libart-like rendering operations and
	X11-like rendering operations.  This complicates matters, but
	I am not sure.  Someone needs to investigate this.