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Needed: Book/Tutorial on learning to create GUI using F#
f#book

Hi,

It so happens that F# is the first programming language I am trying to learn. Now I have no experience of creating GUI using C# or anything else. Any book that is available around that teaches this uses VB/C++/C# or something similar and I will have to learn one of these programming languages to figure out what's going on. Is there anything that teaches this using F#. I know it's all essentially the same when using .NET and only the sytax changes, but still, it requires me to learn it.

Rohit

.

It depends a lot on what GUI tool kit you want to use. There's a choice of quite a few on the .NET platform:

Local client:

- Winforms (old MS lib)

- WFP (new MS lib)

- GTK# (a mono lib)

Web:

- ASP.NET

- ASP.NET MVP

Each of tool kits have different books to go with them.

Having said that I've not read any books on GUI programming for a while, so can't really recommend anything. You may want to ask on stackoverflow.com which is good place to ask general programming questions.

Cheers,

Rob

By on 1/22/2009 8:09 AM ()

Here is a simple Windows forms example that will increase your positive energy and testosterone and provide you with an early success:

1
2
3
4
5

#light

open System.Windows.Forms

MessageBox.Show("Hello Kniwor")

[:D]

By on 1/23/2009 7:51 AM ()

Hi,

Can you please explain to me what do we mean by GUI tool kit, is it like a library or something, if yes, which is the easiest to use etc???

I have used the examples an Expert F#, fiddled around with it, and created a small application too with menus and textbox etc that does some logistic fitting etc... but need better GUI.

Thanks.

By on 1/28/2009 8:50 AM ()

Yes a GUI tool kit is a library, or more often a collection of libraries, for creating GUI. Winforms is the GUI tool kit covered in Expert F# and is contained in the libraries System.Drawing.dll and System.Windows.Forms.dll. It is probably the easiest to use as it provides a simple way of creating textbox's and buttons etc. The other option is use "Windows Presentation Foundation" (WPF) which is newer can probably achieve prettier GUI but is more complex to use.

I've not read them personally but a lot of people recomend either "Windows Forms 2.0 Programming" by Chris Sells and Michael Weinhardt:

[link:www.amazon.com]

or "Programming Microsoft Windows Forms" by Charles Petzold:

[link:www.amazon.com]

both authors also have books on the newer WPF toolkit if you decided you'd prefer that.

Cheers,

Rob

By on 1/28/2009 7:44 PM ()

Hi,

For WPF I would recommend Pro WPF: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.0 by Matthew MacDonald.

Although there is a blog[1] that translates the WPF examples given in Petzold's WPF book[2] to F# (a sometimes not so straightforward process...), I personally did not like Petzold's WPF book.

I do not feel that WPF is "more complex to use" than WinForms. This is only skin-deep: on the whole, WPF is a more consistent, flexible and modular library than WinForms, which has a huge amount of historical baggage, and it's showing.

Either way, I'd focus on learning F# using some simple console applications first. If you want tool support you're going to need to use C# or VB anyway - UI designers aren't going to be supported in F# for the foreseeable future.

Kurt

[1] [link:jyliao.blogspot.com]

[2] [link:www.charlespetzold.com]

By on 1/29/2009 1:59 AM ()

Hi,

Thanks for the valuable inputs. I think I will prefer learning WPF instead of Winforms. Also, I suppose I will need working knowledge of C# to create useful GUI's. And can probably then write codes in F# eventually, but need C# nonetheless.

Thanks,
Rohit

By on 1/30/2009 7:29 PM ()

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