KeyboardSwitch VS Avalonia

While doing some investigation into AvaloniaUI, I came across some great open-source projects that use it and was delighted to find that they follow the more conventional, modern ways of setting up a C# project. I just want to specifically talk about my experience when looking at the startup code.

I've been working on an app (this one) which uses a global keyboard hook. It worked well on Windows, but when I decided to go cross-platform, I couldn't find any existing solutions for .NET. Basically every library for creating keyboard hooks was Windows-only.

WPF is not the best example of open source, as some components are still closed source. Though it only runs on Windows, a closed source operating system, so perhaps that is not so important.

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/2554

That said, there are cross platform, open source .NET UI frameworks out there, including one that is inspired by WPF:

https://avaloniaui.net/

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)