WPF VS Avalonia

Gear up, folks, and test drive this fresh-off-the-lab feature. And should you stumble upon any glitches along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out. Got a bug to report or feedback to give? Send them directly to our dotnet/wpf repository. We’re eager to hear from you, because together, we’re only going to make the experience even better!

I did some research and did not find any proof of the EOL on WPF. In fact, Microsoft just updated the roadmap on WPF 2 months ago.

There’s still room for improvement though. I should add, WPF on .NET Core consumes a lot of memory, due to a memory leak. It was logged by our COO as one of our users was doing a comparison.

have you tried this?

WPF: Licencia MIT.

Some added context: It's a side effect of how variable rendering works in UI library we use. There's currently sadly no way how to disable VRR compatibility, which causes the issue you describe unless you tell your GPU to not treat Playnite as VRR compatible. Some more info here.

WPF is definitely not dead. It may not be the latest shiny thing, but it works, it is maintained (judging by https://github.com/dotnet/wpf or https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/wpf-on-dotnet-7/), and it is fully and officially supported on the modern .NET platform.

This article only sights a video stream. I think part of the problem with the glacial pace of development is reliance on manual testing. See this comment:

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/discussions/7130#discussioncom...

> Our primary goal is to ensure reduced turn-around-times for new PRs as well as clear the pending backlog of existing PRs. To that end, we are working on putting appropriate automation in place to reduce the dependency on manual testing as much as we can.

See also the recently updated WPF roadmap:

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/roadmap.md

If you look at the history of this file you can over the years tests have been always been in the backlog.

As for “where projects go to die”, they have 3 features planned for this year: Windows 11 Theming, a new type of folder browser, and null ability annotations. And they say they don’t think they can do them all. Maybe I’m underestimating, but that’s not a lot.

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.