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Comment by tasogare | Hacker News Reader

Dotnet Core is nice for server software, but Microsoft still didn't address the biggest pain point for desktop applications: the lack of a multi-platform UI framework. This is a pure "strategic" decision, as Silverlight was released for OSX as well as Windows. Instead, they persisted on their UWP platform which didn't even run of the most deployed version of Windows (Win 7) and that unsurprisingly nobody wants to use. Pure sabotage, which is sad because the development tools are great (Visual Studio is my favorite IDE by far).

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I work in corporate and desktop applications are very clearly being phased out in favor of the web.

I see this trend accelerating so for once it seems Microsoft has read the tea leaves correctly.

I know. But in my opinion it's not just that they read the leaves, it's also they push their own platform towards irrelevance and thus the whole situation is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

In comparison to say WPF, the web stack was very lacking. It wasn't for example until a few years ago that we got CSS grids. Heck, HTML components are still not mainstream, despite solving a very problem... which doesn't elsewhere.

Blazor is currently being developed to take on the role of an official cross-platform UI.

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2019/09/26/blazor-...

https://github.com/SteveSandersonMS/WebWindow

Man have they been slow to make progress on that. I first started hearing about it early 2018 and here we are nearly two full years later and it still seems extremely raw. Maybe it will start moving faster now that Core 3.1 has shipped but the pace of progress doesn't give me confidence in Blazor.

.NET Core supports Windows Forms now, with some breaking changes: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms

Mono supports Windows Forms: https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/

Still rough around the edges, but it's coming together.

.Net Core only supports windows forms on windows.

Mono's implementation no longer works on newest versions of macOS unless you compile it and a bunch of other stuff yourself.

So no its not really coming together.

> Microsoft still didn't address the biggest pain point for desktop applications: the lack of a multi-platform UI framework

With the current state of the tech it would be Qt (very awkward for the web though, using WASM?), or a modern web framwework with a design framework (e.g. Angular + Material Design) inside native wrappers. I don't see how MS could step in with some silver bullet solution.

Is this really the biggest pain point? I'm not sure this is a dire need for most businesses. WPF has a compatibility layer that allows developers to use it with .NET Core on Windows. Xamarin.macOS exists if you want the native look for macOS. There's already GTK bindings if you need something cross-platform, and a variety of other OSS projects (Avalonia and Eto come to mind, but I know there are others).

I'm just not sure x-plat desktop is a place where MS needed to step in to fill the void.

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