AvaloniaILSpy VS Avalonia

Keep in mind there's AvaloniaILSpy for non-Windows users.

Sad that it is not running on macOS. For the last few years I used Gimp, but I have a feeling that Gimp is getting more and more unintuitive nowadays (if it ever was intuitive).

Recently I needed to do some ad-hoc drawings and I found myself using one of these online paint clones. There is plenty of them.

I would really love to have Paint.NET on macOS. I think MS efforts for making .NET cross platforms are somehow half-assed. They ported just as much to run web apps and REST services but totally gave up on GUI stuff. Maybe it's their strategy to lock devs to windows machines, as there are many tools like ILSpy that .NET devs often use.

The community answer, the last time I checked, was AvaloniaUI (https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia) which is cross platform port of WPF (at least XAML based). ILSpy is already ported to it (https://github.com/icsharpcode/AvaloniaILSpy) but it runs poorly on Linux (I have experienced random crashes and UI problems). I hope the project will do well and within a year or two we will also see port of Pain.NET.

If you need to view IL on Linux/Mac, you can use this: https://github.com/icsharpcode/AvaloniaILSpy

ILSpy - icsharpcode/AvaloniaILSpy: Avalonia-based .NET Decompiler (port of ILSpy) (github.com)

You might also want to look at AvaloniaUI[0] for a cross platform .NET GUI library. It is similar to WPF but much nicer to work with.

[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

Production user here. There's no money gotchas. They're above reproach. In fact, I've received considerable free support from their devs on GitHub Issues [1].

The Avalonia business model is based on selling XPF, which runs WPF (Windows-only) apps on other platforms. That's very interesting to big corps with existing codebases.

See my comment [2]

[1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246988#39249128

Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned after a couple of years.

Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/

Not my comment, but relevant here "The problem with compiling Skia to WASM is you'll lose any benefits of hardware graphics acceleration on the device."

(From https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/discussions/6831#disc... )

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

For desktop, Avalonia, hands down.

https://avaloniaui.net/

Open source, powered by Skia, backed by JetBrains, and quite battle-tested at this point for small to medium-sized apps. In theory perfectly capable for enterprise as well, since it's basically a spiritual successor to WPF, which has been an industry standard for about 15 years.

They're diving into mobile and WASM well, but that's more of a recent effort and I haven't tested that yet.