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Comment by rozab | Hacker News Reader

Have you looked into .NET MAUI yet? I'm cautiously optimistic, but haven't dug into it. Should be releasing Q2 this year.

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

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MAUI doesn't seem to have Linux support for now. There are some community efforts but nothing here yet. That pretty much kills multiplatform aspect. At least for category of server management tools where my product belongs. Ok, Win + Mac is better than Win only, but if I have to redo entire app it should better support Linux as well.

Also, it's hard to bet on a new MS GUI framework, when they released and abandoned several in the last decade. Will it be supported in 5 years as a minimum? Yes, Winforms looks outdated, but it still builds and works as it did back in 2005.

One more thing, I'm not using vanilla Winforms but also excellent DevExpress controls. For example Winforms has a grid, but DevExpress grid is highly customizable, works ok with 100k rows, has filtering, sorting, etc. It's not only about base GUI framework, it's also about entire ecosystem of GUI controls. And maturity of these controls. E.g. Devexpress has MAUI grid, but I don't expect is to be as mature as winforms one.

I'm not saying that MAUI couldn't be useful for some cases. Even many cases. It's just not yet ready for my kind of software.

I built an app on Silverlight that I sold for Windows and Mac and was making pretty decent money, until MS ended support. I looked into QT as a replacement, but couldn't get a replacement app finished in time. I will never trust MS multi-platform gui again.

Yeah dropping Silverlight support for Mac was a shame, Microsoft finally had a good multiplatform story. They could have keep the out-of-browser mode and market it as desktop dev framework instead of browser plugin.

The biggest irony is that this tech would have allowed them to open a store on Windows 7, 10 and Mac which could have been way more popular due to market share than both the Windows and Mac app stores.

I looked into .Net GUIs about a year ago and it seemed like Avalonia and Project Uno were the most interesting contenders, with Uno getting the edge for me because it had a reasonable looking web deployment story (which I suppose doesn't matter in this case). My info may be out-of-date though, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on those two, if you've looked at them.

I did take a look, but at that time they didn't have what QueueExplorer needs. I wrote in another post that we use relatively complex and powerful grid component. Grid is core component in this case and can't be a basic one.

However if you don't have such specific requirements, Avalonia or Uno might work.

I gave Flutter another try today and was surprised to see it now builds native Windows applications in two flavors, standard and UWP. They don't recommend shipping anything with it yet, but it looks like a good path.

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