241–250 of 276 posts
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No kidding - kind of wild that winforms is still kind of a gold standard experience today! I actually liked VB Forms - lots of easy rapid application development was possible.
WPF as well
Edit - for those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
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As wrong as it feels to have to use Electron for a desktop app, it really is the safest approach for most applications. Qt also seems to be a good option, though there are licensing considerations for commercial applications. I’m excited for various upcoming Rust options as well, but right now Electron is the battle tested option. I am curious though about Avalonia. I’ve heard good things, but it’s definitely a small…
> Qt also seems to be a good option I think Qt really is 'just' missing more language bindings, and a better hot reload story for more people to use it. Lots of devs (specially Free Software devs) would prefer to use native toolkits, if the prototyping experience was similar to how Vite is for web frontend stuff, I think Qt would be used a lot more.
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It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do. I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today.…
> I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome Good heavens. I boggled at this. It's not every single day, but probably at least once a week I am frustrated by this, and have been since the rise of PC GUIs -- so, coming up on 35 years now. It was often doable on DOS-era PCs, especially if you had a mouse, or a multitasking environment like DESQview, or best of all, both.
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Never build a frontend on a .NET technology. Period. They always end up unsupported in the end. Just use standard web technologies and thank yourself later. I've been a .NET dev for a decade now and that's what I've learnt.
As wrong as it feels to have to use Electron for a desktop app, it really is the safest approach for most applications. Qt also seems to be a good option, though there are licensing considerations for commercial applications. I’m excited for various upcoming Rust options as well, but right now Electron is the battle tested option. I am curious though about Avalonia. I’ve heard good things, but it’s definitely a small…
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You can make CAD programs with any toolkit as long as you have a GPU surface to render your actual CAD output to. You can do anything with this toolkit from weather apps to video editors, map analysis, and PDF editors. You can check out the Avalonia demo reel to see what you can already do with the .NET GUI stack that MAUI now uses on Linux and on the web: https://avaloniaui.net/showcase
GPU surface is one thing, but I believe OP means the actual UI controls: buttons, tabs, combo boxes, data grids, multi-window support, etc...
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Blazor is pretty great. It is mature at this point and MS is using it internally more and more. Trying to go back to something like React makes me shudder. It's not perfect, but it's better than many alternatives.
I agree. For Blazor there is hope. It is standard based (web assembly, HTML, css) and it feels very intuitive particularly when compared to other spa frameworks like react. Also you can reuse all your html, css and design systems you have. Which is huge because like that it hooks up with the whole web development stack.
I'm curious to see if .NET MAUI will surpass Xamarin and actually get serious adoption. They have to figure out the third party binding issue.