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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

A platform independent desktop UI framework really is the biggest gap in the .NET platform right now, and I think Microsoft knows it. We'll probably see something new on that front soon, I'd wager.

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Microsoft for two BUILD conferences now has stated putting more weight into Xamarin tooling for desktop as well as mobile (WPF, Cocoa, and Gtk renderers for Xamarin) is an end goal. They exist as community projects already (find them all on GitHub), and it continues to sound like Microsoft only expects to invest in them so much as they find community interests, and maybe a reason we don't hear a lot of people talking about those projects is there sadly isn't enough non-Microsoft community interest in such tools.

I hope. But I don't hold my breath before .NET 5. 3.0 is all about getting Windows Desktop scenarios to .NET Core. Not many of the people who require those would benefit from a cross-platform framework, as neither Windows Forms nor WPF would be portable. Avalonia might have the chance of becoming a decent option, but even working for an employer that provides GUI controls for various platforms it's too early to decide to try supporting it. And then there's the problem that Desktop apps are kinda dying out ...

Except 2-1 laptops are also desktops, which many seem to keep forgetting.

Don't forget Qml.Net.

https://github.com/qmlnet/qmlnet

> We'll probably see something new on that front soon

MS has no interest in this space [0]. Your best bet at this moment is Electron or other open source alternates like eto forms.

[0] - Scott hunter's .net rocks podcast. The related commentary is past 30 mins from beginning of the show - https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1634

That is outdated.

They were running a developer survey about that

I bet our outcries are getting too loud in Redmond. Similar to those of us not bothering with Core until key frameworks got ported.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/calling-all-net-deskto...

They made a survey but that doesn’t mean they will listen to the feedback.

Windows Forms, WPF, C++/CLI, EF 6, .NET Native, WinUI kind of prove that they do, even if it takes a while to actually pay attention.

Even in regards to WCF, I am not sure if they won't be forced to provide some gRPC migration path, when some Fortune 500 start to complain rather loudly.

> when some Fortune 500 start to complain rather loudly

Not sure it’s such a huge deal, .NET core already has the most complex parts of the WCF. It has fast async TCP and named pipe streams. It has .NET binary XML support, DataContractSerializer, XmlDictionaryReader, XmlDictionaryWriter classes, technically IMO better than protocol buffers: no foreign languages, similar level of performance, convertable to/from text XML if you want a human readable format for easier debugging.

When I needed RPC server in a Linux app written in .NET core, I wrote my own WCF-like thing. I’ve made a T4 template which generates requests/response & envelope classes, and channel factories, using compile-time reflection (EnvDTE stuff) of my service contracts. Took me a few hours. These Fortune 500 companies can probably afford doing the same when they need RPC in .NET.

Nope, usually IT is a cost center, it isn't the main business of the Fortune 500 and if it works, has been battle tested in production, there are zero reasons to rewrite it, just because someone is feeling modern without offering a painless migration path.

I wouldn't be surprised, now that Microsoft owns Electron, if the new UI framework took a form similar to Electron, but I am sure Microsoft will need to have something with close integration for C#/VB development.

What do you mean microsoft owns Electron, looks all open source https://github.com/ElectronNET/Electron.NET the guy happens to work at microsoft?? can you clarify?

That is someone's port of Electron to .NET, the official Electron uses JS (and Chrome). Electron is open source, but was created by GitHub, which Microsoft bought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)

Ahh ok, thank you for clarifying that, I was rather confused about it all. I didn't know much about the project by I managed to invent a wrong memory that it was always a C# thing, not that insanely bonkers js, node, applications are webpages thing :)

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