react-native-windows VS Avalonia

Microsoft is using React Native for Windows [0] for their Office applications [1]. As a fan of RN this would be the first avenue I’d explore if I had to develop something for Windows.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/

There's also MAUI (.NET) and React Native desktop.

Sometimes yeah they can become a real pain in the a$$. With RN you can make good looking and dynamic layouts with minimum effort. On the other hand when trying to implement logic my main and continuous issues I am facing is with the async parts . Apart from I am all in for RN . I am going to give it a try for a windows app with https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows .And if it works fine (which means you get your self away from C#) it will be a really powerful tool for me .

You can read more about it here: https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/

at Microsoft, it's used a lot for brownfield scenarios, similar to react-native-windows: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows

you sound more like a zealot than someone trying to make a point. you can deploy to desktop with react native and have been able to for years now, courtesy of Microsoft: https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/

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.