We are very excited today to share that we’ve officially released our first products for the Avalonia UI framework. And best of all, most of what we released is absolutely free to use!

Avalonia UI is a .NET-based framework that enables developers to create cross-platform applications. It’s very fast and uses a custom rendering engine to ensure consistent appearance and behavior across all supported platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, WebAssembly, Android and iOS.

We were drawn to Avalonia because its APIs are largely inspired by WPF, one of our favorite UI frameworks. It uses similar UI control designs, can define structure in XAML, has MVVM support, and makes use of many concepts WPF developers already know. Avalonia is no mere clone of WPF though. The Avalonia team has improved APIs and features over original WPF designs where it makes sense to do so, such as a powerful control theme and style design that uses CSS-like concepts.

Avalonia is taking off in popularity and we can’t wait to see where the team takes it. Now that we’ve laid a solid foundation for future Avalonia UI product growth, our plan is to expand our offerings and create additional advanced UI controls that will be part of our Pro bundle.

Actipro Avalonia UI Free Products

We are making a few of our products free for anyone to use in their Avalonia applications. These products do not require licenses to be purchased.

Actipro Themes ensures that a great consistent visual appearance is applied to all controls within your application, regardless of whether they are Actipro Avalonia UI control products or native Avalonia UI controls.

The Actipro Shared Library is a common control library referenced by all our Actipro Avalonia UI controls. It contains several very useful controls, components, value converters, and utilities that can be used in your projects.

The Actipro Core Library is a class library that is completely UI framework agnostic. It contains numerous helpful utilities and base classes that can be used in your .NET projects.

Actipro Avalonia UI Pro Products

Our Avalonia UI Pro bundle can elevate your applications with advanced controls and our full XAML source for all Actipro and native Avalonia control themes. In addition, the source code for all our Free and Pro products can optionally be purchased.

Pro initially contains our Actipro Fundamentals, which is a collection of advanced controls including beautiful user prompts (MessageBox or task dialog) and a multi-column panel.

We have plans to add many more UI controls to Pro products as we move forward. Pro customers receive free upgrades to any new products and features added to the bundle while their Pro subscription is active.

Getting Started

It’s easy to get started using our Avalonia UI controls.

For control and theme samples, simply visit our GitHub repository and follow the Getting Started steps. Clone the repository to get our desktop Sample Browser solution and run it in Visual Studio or Rider.

The Avalonia UI controls have extensive product documentation available online.

Once you’re ready to start using the Avalonia UI controls in your own apps, reference our NuGet packages.

We'd love to hear your feedback about our Avalonia UI controls and which advanced controls you'd most like to see in the future.  Please comment below or write us via our support ticket system.  Happy coding!

Get Started Buy Pro Now

This version makes a number of minor updates across the WPF control product line.  A new Custom Edit Box QuickStart sample has been added that demonstrates how to build an edit box for a custom type.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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This version makes a number of minor updates across the WinForms control product line.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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This version makes a number of minor updates across the WPF control product line.  A new TreeListView sample shows how to sort columns when their header is clicked, various UI automation improvements were made, and numerous Bars enhancements were implemented.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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While this major new version focuses on the introduction of the new Bars product beta, it also has a number of other minor updates across other products that are described in the related announcement post, which contains a detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Here's a look at some of the new features.

Bars (Beta)

v23.1 takes the wraps off a new Bars product that implements advanced fluent ribbons, toolbars, menus, and related controls.

The new fluent Ribbon has the latest Office appearance and includes the use of subtle animations throughout all controls.

Ribbon can instantly switch between Classic (taller) and Simplified (single-row) layout modes, allowing for configuration of the variant resizing behavior in both modes.

Complex galleries can appear in the Ribbon, as well as in any popup and context menu. It's simple to create new galleries with rich visualizations for any need.

The StandaloneToolBar control can alternatively be used as an app's primary toolbar, or alternatively within tool windows. It can host any control that can be used in Ribbon and overflows items to a popup as needed.

Three user interface density options can be chosen, letting your application select whether to better support a large number of controls, or focus more on touch-friendliness.

The entire control hierarchy can be built using MVVM (preferred), or alternatively directly in XAML.  An optional open source MVVM library is available that makes it easy to configure the Bars controls with MVVM techniques.  In fact, the main Ribbon demo seen in earlier screenshots above is completely constructed from code-behind view models!

.NET Target and Code Signing Updates

Since .NET 5 is now out of support by Microsoft, we updated our .NET 5 targets to .NET 6. .NET 5-based apps can still use .NET Core 3.1 targets.

We’ve also moved our .NET Framework target to use 4.6.2 minimum, as it’s the most recent supported version of .NET Framework.

Finally, we now automatically code sign all our assemblies instead of shipping both non-signed and signed variations.