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Comment by ZanyProgrammer | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat disappointing that it's just a console app. I'd love to be able to do cross platform C# desktop development. There shock be something equivalent to WinForms/WPF on OSs other than Windows.

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This is now possible with the new .NET Core.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/core/index

The one thing they explicitly do not have on the roadmap for .NET Core is any sort of desktop environment / UI stuff.

There won't be a Forms or WPF port.

Personal plug: we're working on it! https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

I've been looking at EdgeJs, specifically one version which was compiled to run in Electron. The idea being to make a bridge between electron and C# view-models (or whatever) so people can build cross-plat C# and HTML5 desktop apps.

Sure there won't be shared UI development support, but you can easily encapsulate app logic from UI. If you're brave enough you can try using Gtk# from http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/

I got the impression that Xamarin was going in that direction?

Xamarin is specifically for app and UI on Android/iOS/Windows Phone.

And Mac. You could write shared business logic in C# for your Windows, Mac, and mobile apps, with a combination of .NET and Xamarin, and still use C# for each native UI.

But it sounds like you are actually thinking of Xamarin.Forms, which allows sharing UI code on mobile platforms as well as UWP. You are correct that there is no Mac support for that.

Ah, makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

They released Mac bindings for Xamarin Forms recently. Not a stretch to imagine unified UI for desktops.

Actually that's exactly what I imagined to happen. What would be so fundamentally different in desktop development compared to mobile UI development that would exclude it from Xamarin? I don't see it.

Are you quite sure? I don't think this is correct.

Xamarin.Mac provides C# bindings to Mac desktop APIs, and has nothing to do with Xamarin.Forms.

Mono provides an implementation of Windows.Forms that can be used cross platform.

I've also heard good things about Eto.Forms.

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