winforms VS Unity-WinForms

Windows Forms[0] is still alive and will never die, and very low overhead to start with, and works on new and shiny .NET 8.

If Linux or macOS, you can use AvaloniaUI[1] instead which is sufficiently advanced but assumes some prior knowledge.

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/blob/main/docs/getting-st...

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

Winforms: Licencia MIT.

3. Therefore reified generics are not possible to implement in a backwards compatible way.

Ok, sure, but if you instead a new generic collection types and leave the old ones alone, you don’t have to worry about breaking existing compiled code.

This comment about C# suggests a lack of familiarity with the approach C# took:

> C# made the opposite choice — to update their VM, and invalidate their existing libraries and all the user code that dependend on it.

All of the pre-generic C# libraries continue to exist to this day (ArrayList, HashTable, and the non-generic IEnumerable). Applications that used them never stopped working. New code uses the generic collections (List and Dictionary).

Anyways, I think the costs that Java is currently paying for non-reified generics (reflection, performance, and type safety mentioned in the article) is not worth the backwards comparability with the 20 year old J2SE 1.4. The price C# pays for making a backwards incompatible generics (mostly some minor annoyance when designing a collection class implementing IEnumerable) is worth it at this point.

P.S. ok, I do admit that C# forking the collection library is still causing ongoing maintenance work 18 years later: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/pull/8673

No, it is fully supported and in active development. https://github.com/dotnet/winforms

No, it's still under active development/maintenance. https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/graphs/contributors

The image is kept in-memory— https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/blob/main/src/System.Windows.Forms/src/System/Windows/Forms/PictureBox.cs

Appears that this has been broken for a while. Seems it has something to do with the new designers being run out of process.

Also, the runtime that C# runs on, is also completely open source as well (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime); ASP.NET which is used to create web apps in C# is open as well (https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore). WinForms/WPF, used to make desktop apps in C# is also open source (https://github.com/dotnet/wpf, https://github.com/dotnet/winforms). All of the source code for these are on the dotnet Github page: https://github.com/dotnet and most are all MIT-licensed.

You'll likely have to open an issue against https://github.com/dotnet/winforms. If you've already opened an issue here, then feel free to link and I might be able to provide suggestions on how to improve the triage process.

Unity doesn't support WinForms but there are some git repo that copied similar functional. https://github.com/Meragon/Unity-WinForms

This seemed interesting so I have it a search and this might be of interest to you: https://github.com/Meragon/Unity-WinForms

Generally using the mono versions just gives you the APIs to access in code and you still use unity ui, however there are some projects like this one on github that seems to enable the form editor on top of unity ui. As for the error you were seeing, i don't know the cause so i don't know if it will be an issue or not. But when in doubt, just make a backup of the project and try it.