ModernWpf VS CSharpForMarkup

I was just googling around and found this page. https://wpfui.lepo.co/ maybe it something you can use. Or this github repo https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf

At least there is WPFUI and ModernWPF. :)

Only really works if you or your users are a fan of Material Design, and honestly MD seems to have declined in usage overall, and there are no big apps for Windows using MD. Seems like you'd be better off with either a totally radical design/theme, and have the design resources to do that, or use something that looks like a native Windows app, whether thats the Win32 look, WPF defaults, or something WinUI inspired like https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf

ModernWpf and WpfUI are both great options for making modern looking WPF apps. Combine that with CommunityToolkit.Mvvm and you've got a solid platform for Windows-only desktop apps.

This one looks pretty solid. There are loads of them. The demos I’ve seen all showcase live feedback.

https://superguigui.github.io/simple-color-picker/

Compare to the best I can find for WPF: https://github.com/dsafa/wpf-color-picker - no live feedback, dialog only, no documented support for modern .NET. There are some commercial controls available from syncfusion and the like if you want to pay for such things.

Compare to color dialog in WinForms: https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf/issues/72

WinUI has a decent color picker, but there are other trade offs going with WinUI that make it inferior to the web environment (e.g. broken rendering of SVG/paths).

ModernWpf (whose status is unclear) has it: https://github.com/Kinnara/ModernWpf/wiki/ProgressRing

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.