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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

There's no point since .NET Core 3.0 can run desktop applications now.

It will run desktop applications developped for .net core. I don't believe that .net core can run a full framework desktop executable.

It can using the compatibility shim depending on what framework capabilities it requires.

WCF, Remoting, Web Forms, ODP.NET, EF6 UI designers certainly not.

Yes, some of those items are legacy, but not everyone enjoys paying to rewrite stuff from scratch.

All the desktop stuff is only on Windows though, right? If I'm not mistaken this is the first major .NET Core component that is not cross-platform, which is confusing in itself.

Yes, since it's using Windows components like WPF. I dont think they ever had a plan for a cross-platform desktop UI kit.

They explicitly won't support cross-platform efforts for the GUI stuff, as stated on GitHub (though maybe, one day ...).

I suppose their rationale is damage control ("Okay, they get the server, but the desktop is still firmly ours"), but it would certainly keep me from starting a personal project with a Microsoft Framework.

> but the desktop is still firmly ours

At this point I'm guessing that it's because there isn't a strong future for desktop apps written in native code. Even VSCode is written on top of Electron. Good, bad, or indifferent I think that there isn't a lot of point in developing a native GUI framework at this point.

(To be clear - I'm 100% sure that there are a lot of use cases that I'm blithely waving away, but I'm also sure that those use cases are currently being addressed with WinForms, Qt, GNOME, etc, etc, so why should MS invest in Yet Another GUI Framework?)

I wouldn't mind seeing WPF, or a descendent, ported to other platforms. Xamarin Forms, Eto Forms, and a lot of other wrappers already do a lot of that though, if you want cross platform gui from .Net. (god that looks sloppy)

I also tend to agree that for good, or bad, that Electron will probably grow significantly as an application base. Like I see node becoming the defacto runtime for WebAssembly, I see Electron taking that place for WebAssembly + UI. And I don't think it's all that bad.

Even with MS, Electron seems to be their unified UI target for a lot of apps. VS Code, Teams, Azure SQL Studio (or whatever the name is now), and don't see that space shrinking. I'm only surprised that Teams doesn't have an official Linux version.

WinForms is outdated, "replaced" by WPF and I think apps on the Microsoft App Store have to use WPF instead of WinForms.

So it would make sense if they're pushing .Net Core to be cross-platform, that they want to eventually push the Microsoft App Store "buy" button to be cross-platform as well, with a GUI framework to support those apps. Speculation, but .. of course they will want to.

You can't publish WinForms or WPF applications to the Microsoft Store, they've both been replaced. It's only UWP or using MS's tooling to convert Electron apps to UWP.

Xamarin Forms is that.

Isn’t that a clone of WinForms and not WPF?

That's probably a good thing. WinForms is still the nicest GUI development experience out there, sadly...

Not at all, it uses XAML and the same ideas behind WPF.

Only partially, try to run any desktop application that depends on WCF or ODP.NET with it.

wcf works under core (at least most of it), core 3.0 + wcf + windows desktop shim actually makes everything under wcf working again.

Most of it is not good enough.

I don't want to be the one stating on RFP "it kind of works".

What is not good enough?

Pick random .NET app using WCF and run it with zero changes on .NET Core.

The implication I took from this was that it's not good enough now, but they anticipate it being good enough by the point this is released.

Those customers want the existing apps to just run. Some of them, as sometimes happens, don't want to rewrite them.

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