GTK#

[pizzaslice]

Dear all and especially Steve Hernandez,

I really admire your open source software and the community you have been able to create. I work for a research organisation and we have various 3D printers in our lab.
My department is mostly focussed on SLA printers in the range from 10000 euros and up.
Your software is already very well suited to control these printers. The main issue we face now is that the GUI of Creation Workshop was written using winforms and the software in visual studio. It would be nice if an open source software tool was used. As Creation Workshop uses Mono and MonoDevelop is cross platform, monodevelop would be a logical choice. I have been able to compile and run your software in Monodevelop-4.2.2 in Ubuntu 13.10. Ubuntu is not directly supported by the Monodevelop community so you have to compile it from source.
The main issue I have is that your GUI is written in winforms and not in GTK#. Winforms is only partly supported in Monodevelop. You can only change it by writing code and you don't have a nice designer interface as for GTK#. As you can imagine, I can not install illegal software. The only thing I can do is to ask my manager to pay for a new version (visualstudio 2010 costs 300 euro's). In addition, I don't like to have my knowledge tied to some closed source paid platform so I would be much happier with a free opensource IDE which runs on a free and open source distribution.
The second thing, I would like to point out is that for me the most interesting part is the slicing and creation of images. If your software is going to be used for various printers. You will have to acknowledge that the only things these printers will have in common is a beamer. Their machine interface and whether they use force feedback, heating etc. depends entirely on the machine.
The slicing and illumination software and GUI interface should therefore be easy to separate at a software level. This is already mostly the case.
Lastly, I would like to re-emphasize how great I think the software is. I will definitely try to create a GTK# gui for it. My experience with c# is however very limited so it will take some time.
Our own code is however already written in C#. We have used C# in various projects and I have used it in combination with OpenCV to vary the dosage across an image.

All the best,

Pizzaslice

[PacManFan]

Pizzaslice - send me and email at pacmanfan321@gmail.com and we can discuss this further. I'm always looking for code contributors and improvements.
-Steve