What is wx.NET?

wx.NET is a .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) wrapper for wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows).

It is composed of two parts:

• wx-c is a C++ library which exposes the wxWidgets API as a collection of C# friendly functions. It is named libwx-c.so on Linux, wx-c.dylib on MacOS X, and wx-c.dll on Windows.

• wx.NET is a .NET assembly written in C# which parallels the wxWidgets class hierarchy. It is named wx.NET.dll on all platforms.

Optionally, your platform may require wxWidgets shared libraries which wx-c makes calls to. On Windows these are not necessary as we can include these in the wx-c library (i.e. statically linked to wxWidgets). On Mac and Linux, however, we currently only support linking to wxWidgets shared libraries. Be sure to review Runtime Library Components to learn more.

wxWidgets, being written in C++, has a fairly nice object oriented design. So this fits well with .NET. While the wx.NET library was written in C#, you should be able to use it with any Common Language Specification (CLS) language, such as VB.NET. Several VB.NET samples are included in the wx.NET distribution and wx.NET is continually tested against VB.NET.

In theory wx.NET should run on any platform that provides a .NET runtime (Microsoft.NET, Mono, or DotGNU Portable.NET) and a wxWidgets port. At the present time, however, we have limited our focus and testing to the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows 98/Me, NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP [need to test on 90/Me/Nt4]
• Linux
• Mac OS X 10.2+

If you want to help us test and make any changes necessary to support other platforms please contact the development team.

wx.NET is hosted at SourceForge. The home page is at wxnet.sf.net.

Last changed on $Date: 2004/07/17 18:23:28 $ by $Author: t9mike $  •  Original Author: Michael S. Muegel