dotnet VS ReactiveUI

Not https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/dotnet

Here's some: - MVVM Toolkit - PolySharp - ComputeSharp

Started programming by writing some apps for Windows Phone later UWP during university. A few years ago I started collaborating a lot on GitHub to some Microsoft projects, like the Windows Community Toolkit. There I created a lot of new APIs and libraries, like all the new animation APIs and pipeline brush APIs, etc. I then also proposed adding some general .NET APIs to it, and that's how the MVVM Toolkit was born, along with other libraries which are now moved to the .NET Community Toolkit. Fast forward until about late 2020, and they pinged me saying the new Microsoft Store (which hadn't been announced yet back then) was using several of those new APIs I had written, so we started collaborating more so that I could add more functionality they needed. After that shipped, at some point there was a new opening to which I applied, and here I am in the Microsoft Store team and also leading the .NET Community Toolkit 🙂

This is tracked by https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/dotnet/issues/409. The issue is likely that AppCenter image using an older version of Visual Studio (and Roslyn). The MVVM Toolkit needs at least Roslyn 4.0 (ie. Visual Studio 2022) in order to work. Unfortunately this is not something we can change from the MVVM Toolkit, you have to open a support request for AppCenter to ask for a newer Roslyn version, or see if there is a way for you to enable that in your pipeline 🥲

The toolkit's:

https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/dotnet/issues/224 - one ask and fix.

Yeah, the fact properties use fields with annotations right now isn't ideal, it's just the best we could do until C# gets partial properties. I do plan on adding support for that though as soon as C# gets that feature. You can follow the progress here 🙂

For comparison, CommunityToolkit.Diagnostics has a guard library.

There is some stuff in CommunityToolkit to lower allocations of frequently converted Spans, StringPool comes to mind.

Most likely this: https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/dotnet/blob/main/src/CommunityToolkit.Mvvm/DependencyInjection/Ioc.cs

ReactiveUI is based on Rx and very popular in the .Net world: https://www.reactiveui.net/.

I use PropertyChanged.Fody all the time and it works fantastically and consistently for implementing INotifyPropertyChange. It is even smart enough to understand dependencies within your get/set functions (should you choose to have custom ones) and notify that property if any of it's dependent properties change. While we are on the subject, if you are using MVVM with observables, you should really check out ReactiveUI. It is wonderful.

Personally I learned to use rx and observables by starting to use ReactiveUI combined with DynamicData for my WPF app MVVM architecture. It was maybe not to best choice out there, but I learned to work with it and some things it allows to do is awesome.

My favorite framework is Reactive UI but it's a bit more advanced than most MVVM frameworks since it uses Reactive Programming. You can still try its most basic features, though.

There is a lot of overlap between WPF and Avalonia so I would start with either one of those. Most certainly Avalonia if you plan to do cross platform dev. I would also highly recommend that you learn and conform to MVVM and dependency injection for your architecture in order to write clean, maintainable, and testable code. My recommendation is ReactiveUI. It leans heavily on more modern patterns like Reactive extensions and IObservable and it can do so much more than just MVVM. As such, it is also very similar to Angular so the concepts will transfer easily if you ever need to do web development. On a side note, Pluralsight has a nice quick course on SOLID design principles. If your code is a mess, it would be a good idea to take a course on this though learning MVVM will be a big step in the right direction.

Also, about data binding and reactivity if you really enjoy WinForms, nevar forget!! https://www.reactiveui.net

Your UI needs to bind to something that can programmatically notify it about changes, we call these things View-Models. Usually View-Models implement INotifyPropertyChanged interface (another key interface is INotifyCollectionChanged that is responsible for notifying collection views that number of items is changed and they need to update the UI accordingly). You can do that (the implementation of the interface) manually or use some library to do that for you just to cut some boilerplate code (e.g. ReactiveUI + Fody or Microsoft.Toolkit.MVVM or maybe even this or this).

Some projects like ReactiveUI take on a more webapp style project structure, with resources being in some static resources folder and all code being in a src folder.