Which GUI framework should I learn: WinForms, WPF, Avalonia or something else?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/csharp

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • 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.

  • If you limit your target to windows the unpackaged apps option from the link bellow should help: Maui unpackaged apps

  • ReactiveUI

    An advanced, composable, functional reactive model-view-viewmodel framework for all .NET platforms that is inspired by functional reactive programming. ReactiveUI allows you to abstract mutable state away from your user interfaces, express the idea around a feature in one readable place and improve the testability of your application.

  • There is a lot of overlap between WPF and Avalonia so I would start with either one of those. Most certainly Avalonia if you plan to do cross platform dev. I would also highly recommend that you learn and conform to MVVM and dependency injection for your architecture in order to write clean, maintainable, and testable code. My recommendation is ReactiveUI. It leans heavily on more modern patterns like Reactive extensions and IObservable and it can do so much more than just MVVM. As such, it is also very similar to Angular so the concepts will transfer easily if you ever need to do web development. On a side note, Pluralsight has a nice quick course on SOLID design principles. If your code is a mess, it would be a good idea to take a course on this though learning MVVM will be a big step in the right direction.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts