Electron.NET VS CSharpForMarkup

Yes, it's what Slack, VS Code and bunch of other apps are based on. Electron: https://www.electronjs.org/ Electron.NET: https://github.com/ElectronNET/Electron.NET

You should take a look at Electron.Net https://github.com/ElectronNET/Electron.NET and Photino https://www.tryphotino.io

Blame web stack? https://github.com/ElectronNET/Electron.NET or WPF

Nope, Electron.NET. Which I should have expected considering how imaginative we are at naming packages.

Electron.NET

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)

Uno Platform can be both XAML or C# Markup if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it.

And if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it, you can have an all-around C# approach for both front end and back end.

Maybe some c# markup libraries like this one. But I haven't use that so you'd need to check yourself

You can CSharpForMarkup with WPF, WinUI 3, Uno Platform. with AvaloniaUI and Maui coming and possibly Blazor.

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

To manage mental mapping of what is being drawn, I keep methods that create widget trees short. My rule of thumb is that whole method has to comfortably fit the screen at once. For each section of the main tree I create a static function that returns a branch of the tree. These functions have descriptive names that help you visualize what element each function builds. If a tree inside a function is long, it is broken down in the same way.

There are some fluent extensions (for Xamarin.Forms and probably future MAUI) that help you build UI in declarative fashion with C#. Same extensions could be created for other frameworks.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/c-sharp-markup-for-xa...

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

For reusable custom widgets that can't be done with a static function, I create new classes with their own widget trees. Try to keep widgets composable and avoid inheritance if possible.

Hot reload is coming in .NET 6, so waiting for rebuild will soon be history.

I have no experience with QML so I can't really comment on that.

If I were to build a windows only desktop app with technology I was moderately familiar with, I'd probably got for WPF + https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup Working without XAML makes life so much simpler.