awesome-avalonia VS Uno Platform

WPF and Xamarin dev here who wrote a new (not ported) codebase on Avalonia.

- Avalonia has a guide just for people like you and me [1].

- Avalonia's flavor of XAML has small divergences from WPF that will have you hitting their docs often. There are some nice quality-of-life improvements, for example you can bind a Button click handler directly to a method without ICommand. The major concepts are the same e.g. data binding, dependency properties.

- Coming from WPF, it's possible you've used MVVM and dependency injection. You'd be going against a strong cultural grain to not use them in Avalonia. But I would be surprised if your WinForms app is architected remotely similarly, so it may be a design challenge extracting coherent ViewModels and properties from the ball of mud that many WinForms apps become.

- For macOS, read up on notarization [2] and, if you're publishing to the Mac App Store, the review process.

- I recommend starting with example apps (look in the Showcase) or with the Avalonia template solution which just runs out of the box.

- The Avalonia team iterates quickly. Expect to upgrade NuGets frequently, and don't get too far behind. There was recently a big jump from version 10 to 11. Good for you for starting after that.

- Not Avalonia specifically but if you're not used to .NET Core check out #nullable enable. Can't live without it now, but was confusing at first.

- Be sure to check out all of the official and community libraries [3]. I bet my design big on `ReactiveUI` and it's gone well.

[1] https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/get-started/wpf/

[2] https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/deployment/macOS

[3] https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/awesome-avalonia

I hear you. We’ve a decent datagrid and a load of OSS components that you can find here.

You can see a lot here and, for example, here

You can find more 3rd party controls here for example : https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/awesome-avalonia

More about Avalonia production apps here.

You could use Avalonia. This is xaml crossplatform and will be better supported than wpf. You can get the templates for dotnet new Avalonia. It's xaml, fast templates and there is a designer op github, can't fidn it atm. Some examples

And Uno Platform (https://platform.uno/) is akin to React Native in terms of native controls usage.

also UNO Platform (C#) which is suitable for simple or complex cross platform business applications : https://platform.uno/

Why is this a problem? At face value, it isn't a problem. Taking a step back at a more global level, what does "uComponents" mean to the rest of the world? Many of the .NET developers who heavily use NuGet may have not even heard of Umbraco CMS, let alone a 3rd party plugin for it. What if people from the Uno Platform community are browsing NuGet for some kind of components extension library? You can see, this could get confusing outside the scope of the Umbraco community/ecosystem. On top of this, uComponents was developed against Umbraco v4, with its last release in 2016, now it's there to be lingering on the NuGet repository until the end of time, set in stone.

Not a fan of XAML after trying to get into it, but there is Uno Platform. It wraps native widgets on mobile, just like React Native (which is good for accessibility), and uses C#. https://platform.uno/

My guess is that it's mainly focused on mobile. On Windows, it has no overhead (behaving like a normal WinUI 3 app), on macOS I think it uses Catalyst by default (which was developed by Apple to make more iOS apps available for Mac desktops) and on Linux it draws its own widgets that the devs try imitating the GTK style with.

On Android and iOS, it just uses the native widgets which I think is a better experience so you can see my reasons for guessing it's mobile-first. That may or may not be what you want.

5- Uno

> ...building UIs with the document/element api

When the whole premise is flawed, JSX or not, does it really matter if there is a better or worse way of misusing a technology not meant for UIs?

Leave HTML and JavaScript to Wikipedia and other hypertext document libraries.

Unfortunately, WASM is not there yet, but people are trying: https://platform.uno.

Uno Platform is fully open source, under Apache 2.0 license. You can see the license here https://github.com/unoplatform/uno/blob/master/License.md

Also, .NET 7 brought a lot of stability so I am confident you'll have a better experience. I hope to hear back from you. It would be great to have any feedback at our repo - https://github.com/unoplatform/uno/discussions