There's Uno, Avalonia, Xamarin Forms, and MAUI, all cross-platform. I think it's a mess no matter what.
Unless I'm misremembering, until recently Avalonia was still being touted as primarily a replacement for Desktop WPF. I was shocked to see they're talking about mobile now too. I guess it's somewhat expected.
Uno basically does what MAUI does. The main difference being, Uno has been around for a while longer and something you've been able to use for some time. I'm pretty sure they had usable versions for well over a year before MAUI was even announced.
In any case...
Microsoft's UI story is a non-starter until they get back to the point that a user can:
- Click new project - Fill out the form - Get a Design window, - Drag a 'Textbox' into the design window, - Drag a 'Button' into the design window, - Double click on the button, get taken into a generated event handler, and the user can intuitively put in the right code (i.e. updating the viewmodel with 'hello world'.) - Click 'run'
That's the Story that got an untold number of new developers -enamored- with VB6, a language that got so entrenched Microsoft had a hard time killing it. It brought a number of developers into the world of C#, making it easy for to write applications used at work that a whole team could use. That's actually how I 'eased' into programming at my first workplace; I wrote an app with a big ugly panel and a bunch of big buttons with labels that would automate tasks. Need a variation on a theme? Drag a new button over, maybe do some light refactoring, test, publish, tell the guys to restart the app. 10-15 minutes tops.
Sure, Eventually I had to go through a spaghetti mess of callbacks and crappy generated code, but it was good refactoring practice ;). And when I left the company, someone else took over the code and now they are a software developer too.
Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.
If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.
But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.
What matters is how hard it is to deliver a product to the end users. As I gave in my personal user story, yeah, I had to eventually pay the piper and refactor significantly to make sure things were maintainable. But it was a good lesson learned, and I've met many other developers over the years who got hooked on C# in a similar way.
> And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
WPF would be fine for this scenario. If we could do things like this at a WPF level of designer I'd be happy. It's got a little more of a cognitive load to get started but long term is easier to reason about long term and from a conceptual standpoint is more transferable to other contexts (i.e. Web MVVM Frameworks.)
I haven't looked at Avalonia in it's current state (last time I gave it a peek, it was still in a 'almost-ready' status) but if they really are able to do multiplatform as I see they say now then perhaps that's what I'm saying is needed. (Which may be more of a statement on the state of Real OSS Awareness in the .NET community.)
Definitely will give it a go, since I know it's supposed to be a replacement for WPF so I'm hoping(?) that the existing tooling out there is usable
Non-starter these days. Building a form graphically doesn't take into account multiple screen sizes and screens that can change dimensions on the fly, which are now far more prevalent than the heady desktop UI days that you're talking about here. Unless you have some novel idea for how to design graphically for all sorts of screen sizes.
It's about the species; Remember that I mentioned that in the context of 'someone getting started'. I say what I say because it would be the best thing to help new users get 'hooked,' not necessarily because it's the best way to make a maintainable app. (IDK though, some of my one-team winforms stuff was actively maintained for years after I left)
> Building a form graphically doesn't take into account multiple screen sizes and screens that can change dimensions on the fly, which are now far more prevalent than the heady desktop UI days that you're talking about here.
There's no reason you couldn't handle such a thing in WPF. Sure, it may be more -work- to check representation in both formats, and some form of helper (that would handle certain scaling factors of buttons/etc) would be a boon to developers. That's not the way I look at it though, see below;
> Unless you have some novel idea for how to design graphically for all sorts of screen sizes.
It's not necessarily about making a 'single' UI that works on both mobile and Desktop. If you can even get to the point where a user can make separate Mobile -and- Desktop 'form-style' built screens for their app, all in one happy framework/language... Frankly that would be the best thing overall, since you can provide optimized Desktop -and- Mobile UIs, and not have to have a bunch of disparate technologies used to build each.
Its been a while since I looked at these and I was having a look for a designer like WPF for Win UI/Uno etc - does this not exist?
