Top 23 C# Desktop Projects

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1. PowerToys

   1 728 120,730 9.8 C#

   Windows system utilities to maximize productivity

   

   Project mention: Show HN: Inspect and extract files from MSI installers directly in the browser | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-06-20

2. InfluxDB

   www.influxdata.com featured

   InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

   

3. DevToys

   2 62 29,341 6.7 C#

   A Swiss Army knife for developers.

   

   Project mention: DevToys: A Swiss Army knife for developers | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-09

4. Avalonia

   3 285 28,138 9.7 C#

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

   

   Project mention: Ask HN: Why don't browsers load websites directly in WASM? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-07-08

5. Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

   4 278 22,788 9.9 C#

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

   

   Project mention: .NET MAUI Authentication on Windows: The OpenID Connect Challenge | dev.to | 2025-05-06

   You know, I'm not the only one surprised by this issue. If you take a look at the long threads around this issue, you can see many developers are complaining about the missing support for a very common feature such as authentication in Microsoft's own operating system!

6. lively

   5 281 16,638 8.6 C#

   Free and open-source software that allows users to set animated desktop wallpapers and screensavers powered by WinUI 3.

   

7. Flow.Launcher

   6 26 10,308 10.0 C#

   :mag: Quick file search & app launcher for Windows with community-made plugins

   

   Project mention: Apple's Software Quality Crisis: When Premium Hardware Meets Subpar Software | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-03

   It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

   Example 1: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

   The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

   The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

8. ModernWpf

   7 23 4,771 7.9 C#

   Modern styles and controls for your WPF applications

   

9. Stream

   getstream.io featured

   Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

   

10. WinDynamicDesktop

    8 25 4,683 7.8 C#

    Port of macOS Mojave Dynamic Desktop feature to Windows

    

11. winforms

    9 27 4,629 9.9 C#

    Windows Forms is a .NET UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.

    

    Project mention: Are .NET 4.x and JDK 8.x the "zombie" runtimes of enterprise software? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-10

    Re: .NET WinForms -- they open sourced it a few years back.

    https://github.com/dotnet/winforms

    They even went so far as to bring back the forms designer to Visual Studio.

    https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/windows-forms-designer...

    Obviously it's still a pretty sizable migration to go from .NET Framework to .NET, but at least the UI framework is available again.

12. electrino

    10 2 4,397 0.0 C#

    Desktop runtime for apps built on web technologies, using the system's own web browser engine

    

    Project mention: Electrobun: Cross-platform desktop applications written in TypeScript | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-20

    So is it a yet another webview-based framework like NeutralinoJS (https://neutralino.js.org), Electrino (https://github.com/pojala/electrino) or DeskGap (https://deskgap.com)? What's their advantage apart from using Bun instead of Node?

    For relly lightweight cross-platform desktop apps better use a non-webview-based native framework like Qt, GTK, wxWidgets or even recently released FLTK 1.4.

13. Maui

    11 22 2,519 9.4 C#

    The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is a community-created library that contains .NET MAUI Extensions, Advanced UI/UX Controls, and Behaviors to help make your life as a .NET MAUI developer easier (by CommunityToolkit)

    

14. ipban

    12 16 1,852 8.2 C#

    Since 2011, IPBan is the worlds most trusted, free security software to block hackers and botnets. With both Windows and Linux support, IPBan has your dedicated or cloud server protected. Upgrade to IPBan Pro today and get a discount. Learn more at ↓

    

15. desktopPet

    13 12 991 0.0 C#

    Remembering the lovely eSheep (stray sheep) from 1995 -

    

    Project mention: VS Code Pets | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-01-18

    Thank you for the link! This is their GitHub repo if anyone is curious: https://github.com/Adrianotiger/desktopPet (I couldn't find the license info though).

16. velopack

    14 1 978 9.8 C#

    Installer and automatic update framework for cross-platform desktop applications

    

17. ScreenTask

    15 1 841 0.0 C#

    (📢 New Version Released) Screen sharing made easy! Share your screen across local devices without internet.

    

18. quick-picture-viewer

    16 1 772 4.6 C#

    🖼️ Lightweight, versatile desktop image viewer for Windows. The best replacement for the default Windows photo viewer.

    

19. CrossPlatformDiskTest

    17 4 610 3.5 C#

    Windows, macOS and Android storage (HDD, SSD, RAM) speed testing/performance benchmarking app

    

20. CsWinRT

    18 8 594 8.6 C#

    C# language projection for the Windows Runtime

    

    Project mention: Lazarus Release 4.0 | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-11

21. maui-toolkit

    19 2 537 9.3 C#

    Syncfusion Toolkit for .NET MAUI offers high-quality UI controls to help you build rich, high-performance applications for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows from a single codebase

    

    Project mention: Introducing the Third Set of Open-Source Syncfusion® .NET MAUI Controls | dev.to | 2025-03-13

    With this latest release, we deliver even more versatile controls to simplify complex UI scenarios and elevate your app experience. Find the new controls on NuGet and in our GitHub repository and take your .NET MAUI apps to the next level!

22. Grayjay.Desktop

    20 3 532 9.6 C#

    Read-only mirror of Grayjay.Desktop repo for issue tracking

    

    Project mention: Grayjay Desktop App | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-12-20

    https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop?tab=License-1-ov...

    There are other licenses like AGPL that would kill any attempt for someone to rip your code off to make their own proprietary offering, without locking yourself out of established freedom, security, and privacy preserving software distribution channels.

23. Discord-History-Tracker

    21 15 517 8.3 C#

    Desktop app & browser script that saves Discord chat history into a file, and an offline viewer that displays the file.

    

24. ChromeCast-Desktop-Audio-Streamer

    22 9 430 5.3 C#

    Stream the sound of your desktop to your Chromecast Audio device

    

25. arcgis-osm-editor

    23 2 410 0.0 C#

    ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap is a toolset for GIS users to access and contribute to OpenStreetMap through their Desktop or Server environment.

    

26. SaaSHub

    www.saashub.com featured

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

    

C# Desktop related posts

• Show HN: Inspect and extract files from MSI installers directly in the browser

  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jun 2025

• The Windows efficiency toolkit open-sourced by Microsoft

  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2025

• .NET MAUI Authentication on Windows: The OpenID Connect Challenge

  5 projects | dev.to | 6 May 2025

• PowerToys – Windows system utilities to maximize productivity

  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2025

• Are .NET 4.x and JDK 8.x the "zombie" runtimes of enterprise software?

  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Apr 2025

• PowerToys Command Palette Utility

  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2025

• Introducing the Third Set of Open-Source Syncfusion® .NET MAUI Controls

  1 project | dev.to | 13 Mar 2025
• A note from our sponsor - Stream
  getstream.io | 13 Jul 2025

  Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure. Learn more →

Index

Sponsored

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads

InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

www.influxdata.com

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