winforms VS sdk

Compare winforms vs sdk and see what are their differences.

winforms

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

sdk

Core functionality needed to create .NET Core projects, that is shared between Visual Studio and CLI (by dotnet)
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winforms sdk
25 113
4,224 2,540
0.9% 1.1%
9.3 10.0
3 days ago 7 days 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.

sdk

Posts with mentions or reviews of sdk. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-06.
  • Programmatically elevate a .NET application on any platform
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 Feb 2024
    [DllImport("libc")] private static extern uint geteuid(); public bool IsCurrentProcessElevated() { if (RuntimeInformation.IsOSPlatform(OSPlatform.Windows)) { // https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/v6.0.100/src/Cli/dotnet/Installer/Windows/WindowsUtils.cs#L38 using var identity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent(); var principal = new WindowsPrincipal(identity); return principal.IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator); } // https://github.com/dotnet/maintenance-packages/blob/62823150914410d43a3fd9de246d882f2a21d5ef/src/Common/tests/TestUtilities/System/PlatformDetection.Unix.cs#L58 // 0 is the ID of the root user return geteuid() == 0; }
  • Swift was always going to be part of the OS
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2023
    > There's definitely things they tried to improve on that... weren't really improvements. The way "assemblies" are matched in .NET is much more sophisticated- the goal there was to try to kill DLL hell. It evolved into the Global Assembly Cache, which is sort of the Windows Registry of DLLs. Not a huge fan of those bits.

    The Global Assembly Cache did not make the jump to the modern .NET (Core). There was the thing called `dotnet store`, but it’s broken since .NET 6: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/24752

    The assembly redirection hell has also been greatly reduced there.

  • .NET Blazor
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2023
    I do the same.

    I have a small write-up here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/10/end-to-end-type-safety-wit...

    You get end-to-end type safety (even better once you connect it to EF Core since you get it all ways to your DB).

    With this setup with hot-reload (currently broken in .NET 8 [0]), productivity is really, really good. Like tRPC but with one of the most powerful ORMs out there right now.

    [0] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/36918

  • Why does dotnet cli not support updating sdk's?
    1 project | /r/dotnet | 16 Nov 2023
    Noticed an open issue just now.
  • .NET 8 – .NET Blog
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2023
    You're thinking of https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/22247
  • LÖVE: a framework to make 2D games in Lua
    26 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
    That's a twisted and wrong narrative

    Unity like refers to a Editor driven approach

    Unity became popular with its moonscript language (javascript like), they then ditched it to focus on C#, but what propelled unity to what it is today is the Editor driven approach, not c#, not DOTS

    They are forced to transpile C# to C++ via IL2CPP as a result to target consoles/mobiles

    C# is a disease when it comes to console/mobile support

    It's a substantial dependency, quite heavy

    And you are not free of unity like fuck ups, it's a microsoft language after all:

    https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/22247

    And let's not forget when they changed the license of their debugger overnight to prevent people from using it in their products (jetbrains for example)

    And them deprecating open source tooling to a proprietary/closed one for vscode (c# devkit)

    Let's be careful when we recommend evil as an alternative to evil ;)

  • How to run multiple programs like python3 filename.py???
    1 project | /r/csharp | 21 May 2023
    The script can be found at the end of the thread here https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/8742
  • Writing Python like it's Rust
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2023
    Another difference you might be surprised by is that the .NET tooling by default collects various data from your system and sends it to Microsoft [1]. If you want to avoid this (and still want to use .NET) you'll have to make sure that the environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT is set in all contexts before touching anything.

    [1] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145

  • .NET 8 is on the way! +10 Features that will blow your mind 🤯
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 May 2023
    SDK Pull Request
  • Disadvantages of using F# with Mono?
    2 projects | /r/fsharp | 7 May 2023
    Pretty sure the final file referenced here https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/8742 is the one I am thinking of.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing winforms and sdk 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

kdmapper - KDMapper is a simple tool that exploits iqvw64e.sys Intel driver to manually map non-signed drivers in memory

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.

MQTTnet - MQTTnet is a high performance .NET library for MQTT based communication. It provides a MQTT client and a MQTT server (broker). The implementation is based on the documentation from http://mqtt.org/.

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

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code

.NET Runtime - .NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.

Unity-WinForms - A Windows Forms port for Unity3d

vscodium - binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing

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

CoreCLR - CoreCLR is the runtime for .NET Core. It includes the garbage collector, JIT compiler, primitive data types and low-level classes.