Avalonia Blog

Probably best off using a UI library like Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/ It satisfies the requirement to "make easy things easy, make hard things doable" and it also gets you cross platform support.

There actually is a great GUI story also for Linux today enabled by the excellent Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net).

WPF is not the best example of open source, as some components are still closed source. Though it only runs on Windows, a closed source operating system, so perhaps that is not so important. https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/2554 That said, there are cross platform, open source .NET UI frameworks out there, including one that is inspired by WPF: https://avaloniaui.net/

Win32 and WinUI serve different purposes, they aren’t meant to replace one another. Win32 is simple but also really low level. It’s great to get a window handler and handle low level events but building a modern graphical UI requires at minimum a layout system, that’s where WinUI comes handy. Also you can now mix Win32 with WinUI via the concept of XAML island. It’s not perfect but you don’t have to be blocked in one world or the other. Though I personally prefer dealing with WPF via AvaloniaUI, styling with winUI is often too frustrating… https://www.avaloniaui.net/

For cross platform framework. I would recommend Avalonia https://avaloniaui.net/ It has the flexibility and cleaner version of WPF but also lets you build it all in code if you choose like Flutter. They have a support business to support the project. So you know it will be well supported for years to come. The team is very responsive to the community also. If I was Microsoft I would just fork Flutter and add C# support and call it a day. Flutter is really flexible for mobile and desktop and has a ton of community support with libraries.

Unrelated to the primary topic, but I have been trying out a new free (as in beer) app called lunacy [1] for prototyping and the experience has been great. I am not a UX professional so can't comment on feature parity with Figma etc. It was however interesting to discover that the native cross platform app was powered by dotnet core & the open source Avalonia framework[2]. It looks quite polished and the framework seems to have come a long way since I tried a few years ago. [1] https://icons8.com/lunacy [2] http://avaloniaui.net/

I stopped counting how many generations of UI Frameworks (Modern UI, UWP, WinUI, ...) they released since Windows 7. All of them ware practically unusable. Some reasons: - They only work for the newest Windows Build - There are no compatibility packs to target older Windows Versions (7 or 8) or even older Windows 10 Builds (not even the Windows 10 LTSC) - They are more proof-of-concepts and feel unfinished. After the release, they only get minor updates - All the minor updates need the newest Windows Build again - Your customers ask you if you are crazy, because your software doesn't run on a 5 year old PC, that doesn't auto upgrade to the newest Windows version anymore There are some great alternatives to check out, which even provide cross platform support: Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/ Uno Platform: https://platform.uno/

https://avaloniaui.net/ Cross platform UI OSS toolkit. I contributing designer would be great!

I remember when I wanted to get into C# desktop app development years ago and it was either WinForms or the newer WPF. I chose WPF and it took a while to get a hang of it (mostly I had to either import some libraries or create some common ones to handle variable updates through UI bindings). Unfortunately, WPF always felt unfinished and missing many QoL features. I was hoping they would further refine and make it easier to work with but I guess it was never meant to be. Windows 10 was coming around corner with UWP being pushed as the big desktop app SDK. Then they ditched that because people just didn't like Windows Store and how they did the apps on it (I also wasn't big fan of it). Then everything went to extremely resource-hungry Electron. Now there is .NET MAUI and and some general WinUI framework [1]. I am utterly confused what is happening with UI development on Windows ecosystem. On rare occasion I want to develop desktop app, I have used Avalonia UI [2] which seems to be something more stable than what MSFT churns out every year or two, can highly recommend that. Either way, they are really destroying Windows ecosystem by pushing out new framework every few years that always feels half-finished before they move on to the next one. This is, of course, on top of Windows versions in general with how they pile new half-finished UI reworks that just keeps piling on insane amounts of technical debt and legacy for future maintenance. [1]…

I would bet in Avalonia UI. It's like WPF but cross-platform. https://avaloniaui.net/

But there are libraries that do that, e.g. https://avaloniaui.net

It is. But if you mean .NET WinForms then you don't really need Wine because Wine uses Mono to run .NET executables. If using WPF then you should check out Avalonia UI [1] which is a cross-platform alternative that is also probably better (and has good tooling in VS). There's also .NET MAUI [2] but it's maybe not as good for desktop apps. [1] https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui

I would personally prefer Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/) over MAUI.

I don't feel C# is that Microsoft-centric anymore - not after the release of Roslyn. It works well on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and I suspect Linux as well (but I never use Linux, hence I can't be sure). And if you want a multiplatform UI there's some decent options like Avalonia UI [0]. --- [0]: https://avaloniaui.net/

Check out https://avaloniaui.net as well. It's basically a cross-platform reimplementation of WPF. It's not quite as simple as C#+WinForms or Lazarus+LCL because you don't get drag-and-drop UI designer, and you need to write markup by hand (albeit with live preview). But unlike HTML, it's actually designed for desktop UI apps from the get go, so it's much easier to write for anything non-trivial. And you can still write "quick and dirty" GUI code by directly connecting event handlers to buttons and updating values etc in it, ignoring data bindings and other more advanced facilities.

Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/, https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/overview/supported-platforms Uno: https://platform.uno/, https://platform.uno/platforms/

That's why I mentioned https://avaloniaui.net/ which does the part. WPF is not bad compared to everything happening in the web frameworks.

C# runs on practically everything these days. See Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/

MS UI has been a mess for years. They just can't pick a paradigm to run with apparently, so people just fall back to good ole' Winforms. That being said, check out Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/ and https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia Cross-platform, open source, MVVM & reactive. A breath of fresh air.

Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/) supports the Direct Rendering Manager on Linux for graphics without X11 or Wayland: https://avaloniaui.net/blog/unleashing-net-on-embedded-linux https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/guides/platforms/rpi/running-on-raspb…

Check out Avalonia [0] It's a cross-platform spiritual successor of WPF and it kicks ass! You get proper separation of models and views, you can separate what controls there are from how they look (themes/styles), you can build the entire thing into a native compiled application with very reasonable speed and memory use. [0] https://avaloniaui.net

> I think Swing is a non-goal of this project. It could work though by drawing to canvas. That's what Avalonia does in C#: https://avaloniaui.net/ Here's a clone of Visual Basic 6 written with Avalonia and compiled to WebAssembly: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6

Slightly off topic, but this was built using Avalonia, which I have never heard of. Has anyone used it? The promise sounds impressive (beautiful, cross-platform applications from a single .NET codebase), just wondering whether it actually delivers? https://avaloniaui.net/

It's written in Avalonia so you could easily compile a desktop version if you wanted, although the author doesn't package one explicitly https://avaloniaui.net/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6

you should checkout AvalonuiaUI[0] or unoPlatform[1] if wanting to target web/mobile/window/linux/macOS if building for the web online, asp.net core runs on Linux servers as well as windows and there's MAUI [2] ( not a fan of this), you are better-off with with the others. in summary c# and .NET is cross-platform, third party developers build better frameworks and tools for other platform while Microsoft prefers to develop for Microsoft ecosystem, if you get [0] https://avaloniaui.net/ [1] https://platform.uno/ [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui?view=net-ma…

> Is there a way to build a GUI app with .NET on Linux? yes https://avaloniaui.net/

You can use third party libs like Avalonia[1] or Uno[2] [1] https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://platform.uno/

This may be your personal experience but it is used successfully and happily by many in a variety of domains way different to "boring OOP back-ends". No popular general purpose language is confined to a single scenario the way you describe (even Swift and Kotlin are expanding). C# lets you do things like writing a competitive Redis implementation[0], advanced physics engine that beats Jolt[1] or a game engine that does not rely on C++ or C[2], cross-platform applications[3] and so on and so forth. It is possible to successfully do both high level FP style approach for business domain modeling and very low-level data crunching that is competitive with systems programming languages. [0]: https://microsoft.github.io/garnet/docs/benchmarking/results-resp-benc… [1]: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2 [2]: https://www.stride3d.net [3]: https://avaloniaui.net

I don't see Avalonia[1] mentioned here. Maybe that would work? It has AOT support too so should help with distribution and file size. [1] https://www.avaloniaui.net/

Their website is https://www.avaloniaui.net/ Where did you go? [Edit] Sorry, I see that you are talking about the "XPF". I didn't use that before.