[Chicago] Presentation on Boo or Declaratice programming for Windows Forms

[Feihong Hsu]

I was thinking about preparing a presentation on Boo in the context
of Microsoft's XNA game development framework, but I haven't had time
to look into XNA yet.  However, if people are interested, I could
give a short introduction to Boo (Boo is a statically compiled
language for .NET and Mono that has Python-like syntax).


In the past month I've had to do a lot of GUI development, and I
created my own library for Windows Forms that uses a declarative
syntax similar to the Breve template engine.  Basically, the syntax
for a form (frame) could be written as a single expression:

Form[
    # Text box that takes up all available space in the middle:
    TextBox(Dock=DockStyle.Fill, Name='content'),

    # Button panel at the top:
    HBox(Dock=DockStyle.Top)[
        Button(Text='Open'),
        Button(Text='Save'),
    ],

    # List box at the bottom:
    ListBox(Dock=DockStyle.Bottom, Name='sections')[
        'section 1',
        'section 2',
        'section 3',
    ],
]

The above is pure Python syntax that you could just paste into the
interactive interpreter.  I don't know how readable that is to people
who don't do GUI programming, but it's a heck of a lot better than
the normal API for Windows Forms.  

Personally, I don't want to go into Windows Forms too much unless
people wanted that.  I would mostly just talk about how I implemented
the library so that people could do the same thing for other GUI
libraries like PyGTK and wxPython.

- Feihong





 
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