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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

More than just that it came from MS.

For a long time, .NET was completely proprietary, and only ran on Windows.

Now it is open source and cross platform, but it is still fighting the momentum of being seen as Windows-only.

except if you want to use for example system.windows.forms, then "oh well different teams maintain that, nobody made it for linux!!!" "the core is open!!!"

they clearly WANT applications written in .net not to be cross platform

It's not about different teams, it's that System.Windows.Forms is exactly what the namespace says. It's Windows Forms. It's a fairly thin wrapper over the Windows API. It's never going to be adapted to be cross-platform and isn't really something they've put any development work into for many years at this point.

If you want a cross platform UI, use WPF with Avalonia. Or if you want something entirely from Microsoft themselves, there's MAUI as an option.

JS is the only true cross-platform UI; sadly.

You spelled qt wrong

More accurately, HTML (+CSS)(+JS).

HTML is all you need for a cross platform UI.

HTML is all you need for a very slow cross platform UI.

FTFY

obviously system.windows.forms could easily be implemented elsewhere, but okay, does any of the other UIs work fully properly on for example linux?

Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/, https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/overview/supported-platform...

Uno: https://platform.uno/, https://platform.uno/platforms/

what ui library are most .net applications created in the business world today using? what is microsoft telling people to use?

There's no such thing; it depends on the app that people are building, their use cases, and platforms.

Case in point: both Teams and VS Code: both web view wrappers.

Some trading shops are still using WPF and some are even using Windows Forms apps still.

I'm amazed people are still using WinForms. When I was going around tables at a job fair in college, 13ish years ago, one of the questions for me from representatives for a large bank was about if I've used WPF. I said I don't use it, and they basically told me I should get with the times.

> obviously system.windows.forms could easily be implemented elsewhere

It can, but not easily. As OP has said, it is a wrapper around Win32, and not an opaque one - it literally has stuff like e.g. the Message struct with members like HWnd and LParam.

Mono did try at one point, but they kept hitting edge cases where this kind of stuff would break things. Eventually they gave up and just wrapped Wine. So, yes, if you really really want to run WinForms on Linux, Mono is where it's at. But ... why?

well maybe because there exists countless gui applications that uses it, and furthermore, if you say its crossplatform, you cant say that with a straight face unless you also support gui? fact of the matter is, microsoft was perfectly happy to preach their .net shit as cross platform to try extend into non-windows usage, except for gui stuff, as thats "for windows"

We are talking about WinForms specifically. If you want crossplatform GUI, then don't write it in WinForms - write it in Gtk#, or Avalonia, or Uno, or ...

Note that C++, Rust, Go all don't have any kind of standard GUI support out of the box at all.

I haven’t developed with .NET in a dozen years, let alone since it went cross platform, but I at least know it is capable of being cross platform. It amazes me how many developers I speak to that still assume .NET is Windows only.

Until I can do apt-install, it's got a problem with availability.

I'm pretty it's just:

    sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-9.0

No?

That comes after adding an untrusted 3rd party repository no? Why are you omitting that part?

Which means that nothing written in .net will enter the real repository until that changes.

Because in the relevant distros it is included in the first-party feeds. Only Debian acts like a special snowflake making it needlessly complex for everyone (including Rust). I believe there is an ongoing work to modify .NET's full source build (i.e. https://github.com/dotnet/source-build) to satisfy Debian's admission requirements, but really it's a problem inflicted by Debian on themselves, not the other way around.

Rust is in debian. Why do you do FUD?

My comment says

> making it needlessly complex for everyone (including Rust)

have I missed something?

Rust isn't a person, just FYI. If you had a point, please make it.

> Why are you omitting that part?

Because I didn't have to do that. Have you considered your distro might be special for reasons that have nothing to do with .NET?

Can you name some examples of popular .Net applications on GNU/Linux or *BSD operating systems?

I can't even name any on Windows.

But that's not really what's being discussed in the context of this thread: application servers handling HTTP/3.

On Windows, a lot of desktop software is .NET these days. It can be pretty hard to say when the apps use native (or XAML) UI, though.

To give one example with a particularly large user base, NVidia control center was a WinForms app for a very long time.

Sonarr/Lidarr and Jellyfin as a start, Ryujinx was one too in game emulation space until Nintentdo DMCA'd everything into oblivion.

These are user-facing applications anyway, not back-end ones which is the more common use-case of .NET (where Linux is the most popular OS).

I have not heard of these apps, but - I'll go look them up (well, the first two), and learn something. Thanks.

About back-end - I would repeat my question but I don't want to derail the conversation too far away from the original subject.

osu is a fairly popular rhythm game that is written in .net

https://github.com/ppy/osu

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