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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

I expect that WPF and WinForms are still windows-only, correct?

WinForms is not windows-only, it has been implemented in Mono pretty long ago already. The major reason almost nobody develops WinForms apps on Linux is there is no visual WinForms designer (which is so good and intuitive in VisualStudio and that's a major WinForms strength) on Linux and given you are forced to code it manually other GUI toolkits can be more flexible, more powerful and look better. In fact I have developed some WinForms apps in VisualStudio on Windows specifically intending them to run on every of the 3 major OSes without modification.

Another major reason is that Mono's implementation of WinForms is:

- quite buggy

- quite ugly

- does not support Wayland

- does not support accessibility

- is literally WinForms. It's a 90s era GUI toolkit.

> - is literally WinForms. It's a 90s era GUI toolkit.

I fail to see how this is a problem, mostly because the job it was designed to do (build guis for desktop applications) has seen little innovation since the 90s.

You haven't taken a look at WPF then, I guess?

That is correct, they will still be Windows-only technologies.

WPF apps are supposed to work on .NET Core and .NET Core is multiplatform so I'd say it's not windows-only - am I missing something here?

"The highlight of .NET Core 3 is support for Windows desktop applications, specifically Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), and UWP XAML. You will be able to run new and existing Windows desktop applications on .NET Core and enjoy all the benefits that .NET Core has to offer."

WPF, Windows Forms, and UWP are listed under the Windows-Only Desktop Packs section in the diagram.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/net-core-...

Got it, thanks!

WPF (and the other UI technologies listed) still rely on a lot of the underlying Windows API. Now that they are open sourced though, someone outside MS can work on a port, though I imagine it will take a non-trivial amount of effort. The change here is that .Net Core now supports it, but only if you reference the appropriate SDK[1]

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/12/04/announcin...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/net-core-...

Things are a bit more complicated than that, I guess that's specifically why Microsoft is open sourcing "the desktop pack", because it is not multi-platform.

This is where .NET Core gets confusing. They're just able to run on the .NET Core runtime (versus the "full" .NET Framework). WPF uses DirectX heavily, so it's not like Microsoft just ported DirectX to non-Windows platforms.

they use dllimport to use native windows dll's: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/search?q=dllimport&unscop...

The Windows stuff is an add-on pack which is Windows only.

They use Windows-specific APIs for input and rendering and what not.

Many projects are porting variants of them to other platforms: Avalonia, Eto, Uno, Xamarin.Forms, etc.

Now that it's open source, the process should be even easier.

Hypothetically, if 10 developers decided to make a WPF fork/patch that would work on linux, would it be a worthwhile project?

Would have to wait until like mid-2019, as they didn't open-source everything yet :( Currently only has System.Xaml

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

A lot of people really like WPF. I'd be surprised if that did not happen.

except that maybe some user now can make a pr for linux

The code has been accessible for a while now, albeit still licensed as proprietary. I went through it a few weeks ago. The Winforms code depends heavily on GDI APIs, which AFAIK are windows only and closed source

Hasn't WINE already reimplemented those APIs?

I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible to kitbash this release with WINE and get it working on Linux.

BTW if Microsoft chooses to go opensource one day they can just start improving Wine together with CodeWeavers, ReactOS team and the community to the point when it could replace Windows completely. This is approximately the way they have chosen to go with their web browser switching to the Chromium Blink engine.

I bet Microsoft has an absolutely killer win32 regression suite. If we're devolving into pipe dreams, I'd probably want that even more than the actual win32 code.

There's an open-source implementation GDI through WINE, so it should be possible to get Microsoft's implementation of Winforms running natively on Linux.

It's not just GDI. WinForms is literally just a wrapper over stock Win32 widgets, for the most part. So you'll need the entirety of Wine, pretty much, and your app will look like a Windows app. At that point you might as well just run it via Wine.

As Microsoft release them, yes.

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