There's very little incentive for them to invest in making a cross-platform Desktop UI, most x-plat UI's suck and requires significant resources and offer little return given the most popular UI's are either Web/Mobile - which they've already got covered.
I'd expect the most likely UI for .NET Core is to host a .NET Core runtime with a cross-platform web-based shell using something like Electron or CEF.
Microsoft acknowledged that using windows as a server is a big handicap for many companies. Making server-side .net components cross platform allows some to use their stack and maybe purchase other products like sql server.
However, the last thing microsoft wants is to make it possible for popular applications and games to run on other OSes. Hey, they need to sell you windows licenses.
It is a standard .NET base that maps to and updates the ECMA standard in a portable way.
Anything else is supposed to be made available via NuGET packages.
I doubt WPF is going to make a big comeback, though.
Not to mention the interop with the amazing Windows.UI.Composition API's, which let you do expression animations, Direct2D effects, lighting, parallax, backdrop brushes (e.g., blur the content behind an element), etc.
WPF's version of XAML feels quite dated now.
Also, doing layout on the UI thread is a severe perf limitation that currently affects all versions of XAML. Consider having the UI framework just specify constraints and letting the compositor/render thread compute the absolute positions ;)
It's not x-plat either ;)
Obviously with Avalonia we have a long way to go (hence the Alpha) so we're getting the basics down first.
Layout on the UI thread is definitely a limitation too. I'd be interested to hear ideas as to how it could be done in a threaded manner.
I'd use it as the basis for Avalonia instead of WPF. If only to have x:Bind instead of {Binding}, which thanks to function bindings removes a lot of ViewModel boilerplate.
How does it compare to Qt, Xamarin an Electron?
