winforms VS ASP.NET Core

Compare winforms vs ASP.NET Core and see what are their differences.

winforms

Windows Forms is a .NET UI framework for building Windows desktop applications. (by dotnet)

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux. (by dotnet)
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winforms ASP.NET Core
25 1,633
4,224 34,396
0.9% 0.5%
9.3 9.9
3 days ago about 16 hours ago
C# C#
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

winforms

Posts with mentions or reviews of winforms. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-18.
  • Ask HN: Any way to write a simple desktop app anymore?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2024
    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/

  • A GitHub issue suggests the removal of the WebBrowser control in WinForms. If you think this is a bad idea, be sure to voice your disapproval on the issue!
    1 project | /r/csharp | 30 Nov 2023
  • Duda carrera: C#/.NET vs. Node/Express
    13 projects | /r/devsarg | 18 May 2023
    Winforms: Licencia MIT.
  • We Got the Generics We Have (2022)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2023
    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

  • When A .NET Developer Learns Blazor
    5 projects | /r/csharp | 15 Mar 2023
    No, it is fully supported and in active development. https://github.com/dotnet/winforms
  • WPF Roadmap 2023
    3 projects | /r/dotnet | 21 Feb 2023
    No, it's still under active development/maintenance. https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/graphs/contributors
  • Where are these images stored?
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 13 Nov 2022
    The image is kept in-memory— https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/blob/main/src/System.Windows.Forms/src/System/Windows/Forms/PictureBox.cs
  • Does anyone know how to make a UITypeEditor for Winforms that works in .NET 6?
    1 project | /r/csharp | 24 Oct 2022
    Appears that this has been broken for a while. Seems it has something to do with the new designers being run out of process.
  • Why is Microsoft's C# not taught in most universities and Java is instead?
    6 projects | /r/microsoft | 15 Sep 2022
    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.
  • Announcing .NET 7 Preview 5
    3 projects | /r/csharp | 14 Jun 2022
    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.

ASP.NET Core

Posts with mentions or reviews of ASP.NET Core. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-30.
  • Asynchronous Programming in C#
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Apr 2024
    > Just .GetAwaiter().GetResult() it.

    That won’t work with various synchronization contexts, where doing this would cause a deadlock. There’s not much fun in trying to debug such issues.

    And now that various libraries only provide async api, or worse an non-async version wrapping the async one with . GetAwaiter().GetResult(), you’ll be in for a treat updating your dependencies.

    Async all the way is the answer, although various frameworks still don’t offer async hooks. Recently I ran into this for example trying to write an async validator in blazor, but that’s not possible and you have to work around it [1].

    C# 5 introduced async/await almost 12 years ago. And we’re still not “async all the way”.

    [1]: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/40244

  • Middleware in .NET 8
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    This approach to organizing middleware enhances code readability, maintainability, and reusability. By following this encapsulation pattern, you're adhering to best practices in ASP.NET Core development, ensuring your application remains well-organized and scalable.
  • .NET Monthly Roundup - March 2024 - .NET 9 Preview 2, Smart Components, AI fun, and more!
    2 projects | dev.to | 9 Apr 2024
    🌟.NET 9 Preview 2 ➡️.NET 9 Preview 2 Discussion ➡️ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 9 Preview 2 ➡️ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 9 Preview 2 Release Notes ➡️EF Core updates in .NET 9 Preview 2 ➡️.NET Aspire preview 4 - .NET Aspire
  • Chrome Feature: ZSTD Content-Encoding
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/50643
  • The Mechanics of Silicon Valley Pump and Dump Schemes
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Feb 2024
    Even if you look at Microsoft’s by far most popular GitHub project, they’re still only half as big as SupaBase. If you believe “the SupaBase story”, SupaBase grew and became twice as large as Microsoft in 3 years. Below is their likes over time if you’re curious, together with a couple of additional “too good to be true” Silicon Valley projects.
  • Bug Thread
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2024
    https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/10117
  • Evolutive and robust password hashing using PBKDF2 in .NET
    3 projects | dev.to | 26 Dec 2023
    To achieve these objectives, we will take inspiration from ASP.NET Core Identity's PasswordHasher class. It incorporates a concept of hash versioning, allowing only the number of iterations to be modified.
  • Experimenting with .NET 8 Blazor Web App w/ the Blazor Server rendering mode enabled but I can't get any my events to fire.
    1 project | /r/Blazor | 10 Dec 2023
  • Observable or promise for http call from ASP.Net
    1 project | /r/angular | 10 Dec 2023
    yes I watched several courses, may be aim not getting clearly. but i worked with asp.net which uses http call and firebase cloud function also which uses socket connection, for socket connection its makes sense to use observable bcoz there streams of data we can observe once the connection establish ,but for http it need to be call every time.
  • Como conseguir mi primer laburo
    1 project | /r/devsarg | 10 Dec 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing winforms and ASP.NET Core you can also consider the following projects:

Avalonia - Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology

Blazor.WebRTC

Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

Xamarin.Forms - Xamarin.Forms is no longer supported. Migrate your apps to .NET MAUI.

deno - A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.

Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code

inertia-laravel - The Laravel adapter for Inertia.js.

Unity-WinForms - A Windows Forms port for Unity3d

PuppeteerSharp - Headless Chrome .NET API

Windows UI Library - Windows UI Library: the latest Windows 10 native controls and Fluent styles for your applications

CefSharp - .NET (WPF and Windows Forms) bindings for the Chromium Embedded Framework