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Comment by runfaster2000 | Hacker News Reader

runfaster2000

Disclosure: .NET Core team member and blog post author.

Windows-specific features are not really "creeping into .NET Core". WPF and Windows Forms will be components that layer on top of the .NET Core runtime. If you want to use them, you will get them. If you don't want to use them, you will not. We already have precedent for that with the Windows Compat Pack [1]. We also have significant platform-specific implementations already [2].

We think developers will like the idea that they can take advantage of OS-specific functionality. We will look for more opportunities to do that on macOS and Linux, too. If we were ever to support the macOS Cocoa API, it would layer on top of the .NET Core runtime, too.

Does that help?

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/11/16/announcin... [2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2608468/39717763-1...

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> We think developers will like the idea that they can take advantage of OS-specific functionality

And what about actually reading and taking in account what people are writing in your blog post comments, here or User Voice, sometime for _years_? It's seems rather clear that there is demand for a cross platform UI API and that the lack of it is hindering .net core proposition value and adoption.

I understand that it is not a decision your team can made only, but please stop dropping the "we're hearing you" meme when some important demands like that are automatically dismissed.

A few related questions: what is the biggest difference between Core 3 and Framework 4.8 in terms of APIs? Superficially the difference was desktop and a few other areas. Is there a reason to keep both branches of the ecosystem if the API surface grows ever more similar?

Second: is the goal of Core 3 to be “feature complete” for the desktop APIs in the sense that existing .NET 4.7 Windows Forms apps (for example) should work without change in .NET Core 3, or is it a less ambitious plan initially?

Some apps might run completely unmodified, but that's not really our plan. We intend for folks to update their apps to target .NET Core 3. We intend to support all the APIs that we find that client apps use. We're not including ASP.NET Web Forms, for example, but we'll definitely be supporting System.Drawing.

We've already shifted to putting more effort into the .NET Core project. The last few .NET Framework releases have been pretty targeted. That trend will continue. We'll continue adding existing .NET Framework APIs on Core to make it so that devs can move more and more apps to .NET Core. That's the basic plan.

From the post:

* Desktop applications will need to target .NET Core 3 and recompile.

* Project files will need to be updated to target .NET Core 3.

* Dependencies will not need to retarget and recompile. There will be additional benefits if you update dependencies.

I already ported a couple of .NET Framework desktop applications into Java instead of .NET Core, because customers wanted to go multi-platform, but were not happy with the lack of GUI support on .NET Core.

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