LemurMadness

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

I just spent some time working with Eto.Forms (based upon your recommendation, thanks!). It looks pretty nice and seems straight-forward. I also appreciate that it officially supports F# in addition to the regular C# and VB.NET.

Unfortunately, it doesn't support .NET Core/Standard yet. The lead dev, Curtis Wensley (@cwensley), is currently working on supporting it and said that he hopes to have to completed in time for the Eto 2.4 release, per their Gitter chat (https://gitter.im/picoe/Eto?at=59d65ab4177fb9fe7e41ff9e).

Another interesting detail is that Avalonia seems to be using Eto's parser implementation. And Eto is (will?) using AvaloniaUI's (the parent of Avalonia) monomac implementation.

The main problem with Avalonia is that it's still in alpha. It looks like a good solution, though, so definitely something to keep an eye on if you're looking for a solution that doesn't require running a web server and render for the UI.

I really like this approach, particularly since it allows a clean separation between the responsibilities of designing the UI and writing the back-end code. The UI designer can still wire up events and design them in Qt Creator (maybe using placeholder events?) but then the .NET dev can write the back-end stuff for it.

That's good point.

But one big difference between Xwt and Xamarin Forms is that Xwt supports Linux via GTK (GTK1, GTK2 & GTK3) whereas Xamarin Forms does not.

Xamarin Forms also requires different code for different targets, such as:

   // Android
   Forms.Init(this, null);
   var androidFragment = new MyFormsPage().CreateFragment(this);
 
   // iOS
   Forms.Init()
   var iosViewController = new MyFormsPage().CreateViewController();
 
   // UWP
   Forms.Init(e);
   var uwpElement = new MyFormsPage().CreateFrameworkElement();