About Views

1. Introduction

Welcome to the Views Tutorial website (Vendor Independent Extensible Windowing System). This tutorial helps you to learn VIEWS. The tutorial start by demonstrating how to use simple controls and gets deeper to more advance controls that VIEWS system have. Any question or comments are welcomed and you can email them here.

2. About Views

The VIEWS project began in May 2002 with a twofold aim: to develop an XML-based GUI interface for the .NET Framework in Rotor; and to promote C# to a wider community, especially education. C# is believed to be an excellent language for teaching introductory programming courses at colleges and universities.

However, there is a dilemma if C# and .Net environment are to be taught together at the same time to the first year students, there is just so much to teach at the same time. But in today's world students need to have the Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) in their programs. This is where views will come to rescue. Views allows users to build GUIs and use these GUIs with C# or other languages such as VB.NET without the full .NET environment installed on their computers.

The controls that the VIEWS user can add to his GUI are:

Button, TextBox, Label, CheckBox, ListBox, PictureBox, GroupBox, RadioButtons, ProgressBar, TracksBar and other Tags that we shall discuss on this tutorial.

 With such controls a beginner can build basic Gui that he requires.

 

3. Compiling and Running Views with C#

 

Download the Views Package here.

To Demonstrate how Views works we will use the program called "Calculator.cs". The Calculator program can be downloaded from here.

Instructions on how to run Calculator.cs

 

Download and unzip the package into a new directory.

bulletIf you are using Visual Studio .Net, create a new Console Application project, and replace the default Class1.cs file with Calculator.cs.  Add references to System.Windows.Forms.dll, System.Drawing.dll, and Views.dll (obtained after unzipping the package). You can now compile the example. 

 

bulletIf you are using the command-line tools to compile C# code, open a Command prompt window and change the active directory to the directory created in the f
bulletirst step.  Ensure that the csc.exe tool is visible via the PATH environment variable.  Compile the code by issuing the following command:
        csc /r:Views.dll Calculator.cs
You can now run the example using the .exe file generated.

The next pages show how we can create Guis using Views.

 NEXT>>

 

This tutorial was created by Hulisani Ratshinanga.