Building .NET GUIs for Haskell applications

Authors

Beatriz Alarcón and Salvador Lucas

Abstract

.NET is an emerging Microsoft's project which promotes a new framework for Software Development emphasizing the use of Internet resources and the interaction between components written in different programming languages. Whereas functional programming languages such as Haskell are well-suited for developing tools to analyze, verify and transform programs, typical Haskell compilers do not provide sophisticated capabilities such as support for XML-Web services, assisted GUI development, HTML processing, etc., which are frequent in most .NET development frameworks. We show how to integrate software components developed in a functional language as Haskell together with (graphic) components developed in C# or another .NET language. To achieve our objective we use the facilities offered by .NET to import COM components, on the one hand, and the technology developed to generate COM components from Haskell modules, on the other.