I need to look at the open source options.
Back when Shwartz was the Sun CEO and I was a Java fanboy, when I wanted to make a cross-platform, easy to install GUI application, my choice was obvious. Swing is still my favorite widget toolkit.
One time I tried to make a GUI app in F#, only to discover that even VisualStudio didn’t have real integration with GUI building tools for it. I haven’t tried since then, but if I can get it to work with Mono, I guess I’ll be happy.
Yes, I know of GTK#. My feeling is that it combines the disadvantages of both, if you want the end user on Windows to install GTK anyway, you can just make native executables in any language of your liking.
Yes, you can definitely package anything together so that the user doesn’t have to install any dependencies by hand, but… If you are making a small app, making a package many megabytes in size is likely to just scare Windows people off. UNIX people are unlikely to be fascinated by the prospect of installing a .Net implementation for dependencies just for one app (or even installing it at all), but at least most of them understand the why’s.
A bit of a mess, although I’ve still to try to work with something as good as WPF, it has some magic but MVVM seems to be the less worst of the UI patterns.
Maybe also: unity.
I need to look at the open source options. Back when Shwartz was the Sun CEO and I was a Java fanboy, when I wanted to make a cross-platform, easy to install GUI application, my choice was obvious. Swing is still my favorite widget toolkit.
One time I tried to make a GUI app in F#, only to discover that even VisualStudio didn’t have real integration with GUI building tools for it. I haven’t tried since then, but if I can get it to work with Mono, I guess I’ll be happy.
There’s always Gtk#. It appears to be maintained. I haven’t used it so I’m just suggesting it as another option.
Yes, I know of GTK#. My feeling is that it combines the disadvantages of both, if you want the end user on Windows to install GTK anyway, you can just make native executables in any language of your liking.
that comes down to packaging. xamarin studio is a complex GTK# app that is packaged such that you don’t really know what ui toolkit it uses.
Yes, you can definitely package anything together so that the user doesn’t have to install any dependencies by hand, but… If you are making a small app, making a package many megabytes in size is likely to just scare Windows people off. UNIX people are unlikely to be fascinated by the prospect of installing a .Net implementation for dependencies just for one app (or even installing it at all), but at least most of them understand the why’s.
A bit of a mess, although I’ve still to try to work with something as good as WPF, it has some magic but MVVM seems to be the less worst of the UI patterns.
Wow - Avalonia sounds like exactly what I needed for a new desktop-oriented project. Thanks for sharing
IMO this is not a very good assessment. Mentioning glade#? GTK# may not be dead, but AFAIK glade# is.