.NET core support

Hi Miguel,

At the moment, most of our development resources are working on completing the massive SyntaxEditor vNext project, which will unify the WPF, UWP, and WinForms SyntaxEditors under the same API.  Once that is finished and stabilized, we will be looking at other areas.  I've bumped up priority on looking at moving to .NET 3.0 to see what's involved.  That is something we will want to get into sometime in the coming months.

Hi,

we're interested too in this question. Are there any news? Your competitors mostly all have .NET Core supported.

Hi Dirk,

When running the Microsoft Portability Analyzer on the recent WPF control DLLs of ours, they are pretty much 100% compatible other than one call in SyntaxEditor and three calls in the Text.Addons.DotNet assembly.  That being said, running a stub .NET Core 3 app in VS 2019 with all of those products in use seems to be working fine.

Now that VS 2019 is near final release, we will be looking into all this more soon.  From your perspective and anyone reading this, what can we do to make sure that everything is configured optimally for your needs?

I assume you'd like to see pre-compiled .NET Core 3 assemblies distributed side-by-side with the normal .NET Framework versions via our controls installer?  Or is using the existing .NET Framework assemblies fine?  What else would you like?  Please be as detailed as possible.  Thanks!

Hi,

we like to drop .NET Framework dependency completely and make our app self-contained running everywhere on all computers. We already did that with another application and it was a huge success. At the moment lots of support inquiries we receive are all .NET Framework dependency related, this costs us a lot of time and money.  This is why we would like to not going the way of .NET Framework / .NET Core mix-up, although you are right this is currently possible. So you are right that pre-compiled .NET Core 3 assemblies are mandatory and should be distributed either side-by-side or by separate installer.

I see a lot .NET developers porting their software to .NET Core and I agree with Miguel the rapid development, massive improvements and the fact that its open source are the main reasons but also that, although Microsoft said they will continue to support .NET Framework, all new features will be mainly .NET Core exclusively.

Maybe in the long run you could take a look and see if WPF Studio can benefit performance whise from all the new features in .NET Core like Span<T> or hardware infragistics but at first and especially as long as .NET Core is not a final product pre-compiled binaries without any changes should be enough.

Thanks for taking a look at it, we are really looking forward to it.

Hi,

is there any news on this? Do you plan to release .NET Core binaries on vNext release?

Hi Dirk,

We had e-mailed you over a week ago to try and get some private feedback but never got a reply.  I wanted to check in and see if your received the e-mail from our support address?  Perhaps check your spam folder if you didn't.

Just wanted to add our voice to the need for this.  One of our applications heavily depends on the docking controls and we would be blocked in our migration to dotnet core 3.0 unless the actipro controls support.  I believe that means they need to target dotnet standard 2.1?

regards

Hi Eamon,

I'm using Actipro (including docking controls) since .net core 3 preview 3 and the only issue I had was that scrollbars were rendered too big on high DPI systems. This was a .net core issue and fixed in preview 5 or so. I'm also using other controls like ribbon, tree, and many more and haven't seen any other issues. All seems working fine.

Did you try switching to core 3 and did you experience any issues?

Regards,
Stefan

Hi Eamon,

As Stefan said, you should be able to use the existing assemblies with .NET Core 3.0.  Our longer term plan is to keep the existing .NET Framework-based assemblies that are distributed, but also build out and distribute other variations of the assemblies that are built on .NET Core 3.0.  Effectively the UI-related assemblies need to target .NET Core 3.0 and the non-UI assemblies (like some of our SyntaxEditor "Text" assemblies) can target .NET Standard 2.0.  Internally we have these variations compiling.  We need to get past more work on SyntaxEditor vNext (getting the UWP version finalized and released, and then the WinForms version).  Then getting distributions of those native .NET Core/Standard variations completed is a high-priority item.

For anyone who is interested. The existing ActiPro assemblies work perfectly fine on self contained .NET Core 3.0 applications. That means that if you plan to migrate you can do this already. After talking with the .NET team it turned out that the framework assemblies will run on .NET Core 3.0 as well.

I couldn't believed this until I've tested it on my own by publishing a self contained application that uses the SyntaxEditor and docking control and ran it on a machine where I uninstalled any .NET framework versions and it just works.

Apologies for the delayed reply on this.  We wanted to update you that WPF Controls v21.1 fully supports .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5, has NuGet packages on nuget.org, online documentation, and a GitHub repository with the full source of documentation and samples.

Please see this blog post for more details:
https://www.actiprosoftware.com/blog/post/25479/wpf-controls-v211-released