WinForms Getting Started Guide

Installation

System.Windows.Forms is part of a standard Mono installation.

WinForms Example

As there are plenty of great articles and books on Windows Forms programming, the topic will not be covered in-depth. The following is just a simple Winforms program to test with.

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
 
public class HelloWorld : Form
{
    static public void Main ()
    {
        Application.Run (new HelloWorld ());
    }
 
    public HelloWorld ()
    {
        Button b = new Button ();
        b.Text = "Click Me!";
        b.Click += new EventHandler (Button_Click);
        Controls.Add (b);
    }
 
    private void Button_Click (object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show ("Button Clicked!");
    }
}

If you save this code as hello.cs, you would compile it like this:

csc hello.cs -r:System.Windows.Forms.dll -r:System.Drawing.dll

The compiler will create “hello.exe”, which you can run using:

mono hello.exe

NOTE: on macOS you’ll have to wait around a minute the very first time you run this command. You also need to use mono32 since WinForms isn’t supported on 64bit yet. As of macOS 10.15 Catalina there’s no 64bit support anymore so WinForms doesn’t work there at the moment.

Results running on openSUSE 10.2