I’m in process of creating a pretty large scale add on to rhino. I’ve started to code it using windows forms and now it has started to swell up like a bun dough. So before it becomes unbearable difficult to do a large scale changes to the program I wanted to ask some general questions:
-Would it better to change from windows forms to wpf?
-What are the benefits in registering the forms/user controls as rhino panels? To open this question a bit I’m a bit frustrated with some of the properties of the rhino forms which are:
- I cannot maximize the form to a different screen. (If i double click the form it will automatically dock into the rhino.
- When I take a focus out of the rhino (to some other program) the panel disappears, which is very frustrating when I want to some data from the panel.
So my main idea of how to use the add on is in full screen mode in a monitor next to the monitor where the rhino is running.
-Is it ok to store large amount of data with the archivable dictionary into the rhino file? I am planning of bringing FEM data to my plugin, which results a data a mouth which can be hundreds of megabytes.
If you even want to have your plug-in work on the Mac version you best move to Eto.Forms. This is what we are using as well, and probably will be the best supported mechanism.
I think you should be able to work around that with _TestHideOnDeactivate. There is a YT item to have this become a regular option.
I leave the other questions open for @dale or anybody else who may have an informed opinion those.