WinUI 3 and dotNet Maui

Hi Tom,

Yes, we are working with Microsoft on strategies to migrate our UWP Controls to WinUI 3.  One issue there is that Win2D (which SyntaxEditor relies on) isn't yet supported in WinUI 3, but support for that is theoretically coming in the future.  No timeline available yet.

As for .NET 6 MAUI, we will probably start investigating that after the port to WinUI 3 is done.

Thanks for the quick response. I am looking forward to the release!

Any update on this ?

Hello,

After doing further work in WinUI 3, we started to evaluate some alternative options as well for future platforms.  Our favorite UI framework to work in has always been WPF. 

WinUI 3 is effectively the next UWP iteration, and as with UWP, it can be a frustrating development experience due to things like very long compile times, occasional unexplained platform errors, etc.  WinUI 3 is also limited to the Windows realm. 

MAUI allows for cross-platform development, but one thing conceptually we don't like about it is that it wants to use native controls on each target platform for everything.  This results in a lot more work and testing needed for development on each target platform, and makes things more difficult to provide a consistent experience across platforms. 

We then started to evalute Avalonia, which is a third-party framework that allows for cross-platform development.  While it is third party, it is heavily influenced by their own love for WPF and its design even improves upon some WPF concepts in meaningful ways (improved styling capabilities, etc.).  It can run on all desktop platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux), in the web browser, and there is beta functionality for mobile operating systems as well.  It's been described as the Flutter of the .NET world, and renders everything the same across all platforms.  Best of all, a lot of our existing WPF code product code would port over to Avalonia easier than to other frameworks.  While we are still gauging things to see how these frameworks get adopted in the coming months, Avalonia seems to be the most natural framework for us to move into, given our existing codebases, developer skillsets, and desire to allow our products to be used on more than just Windows.

Nothing is set in stone yet since we are currently working on major updates to our WPF and WinForms control offerings, but that's where we are at as of today.  We are of course open to thoughts from customers and would love to continue any related conversations offline via our ticket system.

I'm excited! Adding support for Mac and Linux will be a huge improvement   

This is great news! Any news on the evaluation of Avalonia? We have started porting our code from our WPF app to our Avalonia UI app. But, there are some controls that are heavily reliable on activepro components, we are hoping actipro is going to add some support.

Hi JP,

We just got our v23.1 release of the WinForms controls out and are now exclusively focused on getting our v23.1 release of the WPF controls finished, which includes a new Bars product.  We hope to have that done in the next 2-3 weeks.  After that, we plan to start developing some initial Avalonia controls.  We'd love to discuss more about your needs on that framework as all feedback helps.  Please contact our support address and tell us the most important missing control areas you see on that framework.  Thanks!

I would like to give my vote for Docking port to Avalonia

I'm a little confused by the answer; are you saying there will not be a WinUI version of the controls? (Win2D is in preview for WinUI now).

I ask because Telerik and SyncFusion have both released their (subset) controls for WinUI.

thanks 

Hi David,

Supporting UWP turned out to be a very large financial loss for our company, and it doesn't feel like the community (at least our customer segment of the community and based on general reseller feedback) is looking in general to build WinUI-based apps.  As such, I'm sorry but we do not plan to move to support WinUI at this time unless things change drastically.

We have been working in Avalonia for a while now and feel that of all the .NET-based UI frameworks we've examined, it is the best designed and sits in the best position to be successful in the future.  We will continue focusing on WPF and WinForms development too, since many companies still are very invested in those UI frameworks.