Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NET core and ASP.NET core

Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by roryisok on Friday November 03, 2017 @04:01AM (#15617407)

I was really excited when I saw this because I thought someone had finally brought us a .net alternative to electron, using xaml. Unfortunately this seems to be electron but with a .net webapp running in the background? You still need node and webkit for the UI it seems. If that's what this is, it was already possible to do with edge.js and electron so I'm not sure what advantage there is here.

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by CodeCube on Friday November 03, 2017 @09:15AM (#15618920)

https://www.xamarin.com/forms

Mac desktop support is in preview (https://blog.xamarin.com/preview-bringing-macos-to-xamarin-f...), and Linux and WPF backends are in development. So ... almost there!

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by roryisok on Friday November 03, 2017 @12:41PM (#15620472)

Wpf? Does that mean it might be possible to target windows 7?

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by cm2187 on Friday November 03, 2017 @04:57AM (#15617656)

Agree. To me the solution will be webassembly. I entertain the hope that there will be a .net runtime for webassembly, in which case you will be able to write a full cross platform application without having to write a line of JavaScript. Won’t be XAML+.net but will be HTML+.net.

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by roryisok on Friday November 03, 2017 @09:09AM (#15618872)

Even web assembly would still require a full webkit / browser instance though. UWP or WPF apps that run XAML don't have a browser instance (unless they use webview) and the memory footprint is much much lower than the equivalent electron app. I'd like to see cross platform xaml so I can build a .net core app with a GUI that will run on Mac or Linux.

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by LemurMadness on Monday November 06, 2017 @11:26AM (#15636531)

It looks like there's two options for cross-platform XAML UIs:

* Prism [1], which doesn't seem to support .NET Core. It was originally created by Microsoft Patterns & Practices, but then open sourced it. It's now community maintained. It looks like it's still being actively developed as there was a merge 4 days ago.

* Avalonia [2], which supports .NET Core but is still in alpha.

[1] https://github.com/PrismLibrary/Prism [2] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by hacker_9 on Friday November 03, 2017 @07:02AM (#15618179)

DOM interaction and Garbage Collectors are still a heavy research topic within the WebAssembly community, and aren't part of the MVP [1]. Plus MS would need to create a custom C# -> WASM compiler as they don't use LLVM internally. All this means you are probably going to be waiting at least another 5 years before you can compile .Net GUI apps straight to the web.

[1] http://webassembly.org/docs/future-features/

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by j_s on Friday November 03, 2017 @08:03AM (#15618464)

> C# -> WASM compiler

https://github.com/kg/ilwasm/ [2015]

Unfortunately, more proof of concept than anything

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by hacker_9 on Friday November 03, 2017 @08:46AM (#15618711)

No doubt you'll find lots of attempts on github, but no business will touch it unless it's an offical compiler with Microsoft's backing, who continue to release updates and provide support for it.

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Re:Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NE... by ashark on Friday November 03, 2017 @10:51AM (#15619594)

Javascript's not the worst part of Electron (performance/size-wise). HTML+CSS is. See the imperfect, but much better, experience with React Native on mobile.

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