What options are there for displaying a presentation slideshow in C#?

Question

The Scenario:

I need to create a lightweight presentation application that offers PowerPoint-like features such as:

• Simple text formatting (font, colour, size, style, etc)
• Picture embedding (possibly video as well)
• Simple animations (just slide, fade and appear actually)

The presentations themselves will be arrays (or Dictionaries) of strings from either a built-in database or a series of XML files (probably a combination of both).

I intend to develop and test the application, and create presentations on a Windows PC, and then display (and possibly edit) those presentations on a Linux-based PC.

The Options:

The options I know about are:

• WinForms
  • Pros:
    • No external code needed
  • Cons:
    • Limited screen redrawing ability
    • Limited/No animations available
• HTMLRenderer
  • Pros:
    • Proven reliable layout format (HTML 4.01 + CSS Level 2)
    • Code freely available for embedding
  • Cons:
    • Code hasn't been updated since 2009
    • Author's website gives 404, and his company website is incomplete.

My question is, quite simply, what other options are there? And which would be the best for my needs?

Answer 1

I would be very tempted to do this using Gtk-Sharp and to use WebKitSharp for rendering full HTML documents ( no need to restrict yourself )

You could possibly allow your program to consume a zip file containing html docs and images, perhaps even javascript and css.

Both libraries sould allow you to quite easily write ac# application that will run on mono on linux or OSX or windows with .Net or Mono.

That said, Webkit sharp has not had much in the way of recent checkins..