CoreWCF VS Avalonia

CoreWCF might be of some use.

You can open a discussion in the CoreWCF repo:

In the later versions you could avoid almost all the XML mess by configuring all of the settings in code. The experience is pretty close to gRPC imo, one plus point is you don't need to learn how to write proto classes. Though you could use protobuf-net for a similar experience. I'm kinda hopeful with CoreWCF, they aim to support more transports (including event gRPC) in the future along with queues other than MSMQ and slowly evolve from being too SOAP specific. There's a lot of potential still for WCF to be a transport agnostic framework that ecompass a lot of transports.

On our end, it's WCF for some servers that haven't been upgraded over. Though it seems we have a path forward for that now with CoreWCF that we're working towards.

There's ongoing work on adding generic queue support. The first two concrete implementations should be MSMQ and RabbitMq from what I recall, though MSMQ will be windows only. But the nice thing about the work is it also opens up other types of message queues for WCF (e.g. Azure Service Bus, RabbitMq, Amazon SQS etc...).

It's seems there's already design work started for a generic queue concept here. I'm pretty interested to see how it goes as well as that'll be a big part for CoreWcf to move forward as a viable choice for greenfield projects and not just a way to migrate existing Wcf projects to Core.

The ongoing .net core port called CoreWcf plans to realize that goal as a future feature on it's roadmap. Where there's plans on adding new transports that didn't exist on .net framework wcf like Grpc, Azure Service bus, Amazon SQS, rabbitmq etc...

If you hit any difficulties or have any problems, feel free to jump on the gitter channel. Details for that are in the repo contributing guide.

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.