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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

You won' probably catch any exec from MS and Apple admitting the obvious, but it's really against their best interest to encourage multi-platform apps as this would give users a choice between operating systems. It's not something that is discussed a lot these days because modern web apps are quite powerful, yet it's clear a good quality multi-platform toolkit would be a boon to users and developers alike.

As for MS open sourcing .NET Core it's all good and nice, but WinForms and WPF are still Windows-only, and according to MS they will remain this way. And Apple has no intentions of doing the same with SwiftUI.

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I haven't tried to use it in anger, but https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/

"Support for Winforms 1.1 and 2.0 has been completed, and is now in a maintenance/bug fixing state."

"System.Windows.Forms implements its own driver interface to communicate with the host OS windowing system. Currently, we have drivers for X11, Win32, and macOS. These drivers translate the native window messages into WndProc compatible messages, to provide as much compatibility with native .Net as possible."

WPF is windows-only though.

To clarify: you can't use Windows Forms directly with .NET Core on non-MS platforms - you nee to port them to Mono.

I tried to use Mono several times, starting from Ximian and Xamarin times, and I always encountered strange problems that were not present in the original applications. I hope they improved somewhat recently because the code produced back then was often unusable (e.g. huge leaks after a couple of hours of use.)

Be interesting to see what happens, MS is releasing.Net 5.0 That's supposed to be cross platform and supersedes all the other stuff.

While the backends are unified, MS still do refuses to fix the UI framework. They instead have yet another version of the post WPF scrambled egg UI framework. AKA WinUI3.

the native grumpy old people like me will continue to use Windows forms or WPF or MFC,ATL,Win32.

The masochists will try to use the open-source silverlight replacement. Moonlight?

The futurists will use Avalonia. Maybe SAFE stack MVU via Fable?

The Microsoft contractors will use WinUI3.

Vast majority of web developers today will use electron, as unfortunate as that is...

WinUI keeps being UWP, and by the way WPF is now officially in maintenance mode.

Your Silverlight replacement would be OpenSilver.

The cross platform toolkits would be MAUI (nee Xamarin) and Blazor.

Electron is the new Active Desktop/XUL, its fashion phase will eventually fade away.

> WPF is now officially in maintenance mode.

Can you share the official source of this statement?

And the web nostalgists will target Ruffle.

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