Microsoft Makes Open-Source Windows Forms, WinUI, WPF

[the_scx]

Pinta is Paint.NET. =)

No, it's not. This statement misleads potential users and causes disappointment.
In fact, Pinta was strongly inspired by Paint.NET, but it is not a port of this program for Linux. This is more like Notepad++ and Notepadqq, WinAmp and XMMS or Nero Burning ROM and K3b.
Unfortunately, Pinta lacks many original functions, such as DDS support. And for this reason, calling it the Paint.NET port/fork/clone is harmful.

[Vistaus]

Sidebet: Ubuntu will be called Microsoft Ubuntu within 12 months.

Yup, just like how Microsoft changed GitHub's name to Microsoft GitHub and its address to github.microsoft.com... oh wait.

[tildearrow]

Windows Forms is a legacy technology, and modern apps use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or the newer UWP.
Windows Forms is a wrapper over Win32 APIs such as GDI+, so its not portable to Linux.

Sadly, many C# apps I use (StepEdit Lite, BizHawk and hakchi2) use WinForms. You think about dropping everything that is legacy, but as you may know, Microsoft is all about backwards compatibility.

However since Wine implements Win32 and GDI+ maybe it can somehow be used together with Mono and/or Wine.
Or the interface and API of Windows Forms could be implemented on Mono to wrap over POSIX and GTK+ or Qt.

The latter is the best choice. Wine's default skin really feels very old, and don't even think about themes: they are from the Windows XP era... Plus they still don't support real UI scaling. But please, no, not GTK+...

[the_scx]

The latter is the best choice. Wine's default skin really feels very old, and don't even think about themes: they are from the Windows XP era... Plus they still don't support real UI scaling. But please, no, not GTK+...

No, it's not. They already tried and failed, because mapping one toolkit's semantics to another is extremely hard, if not impossible. See my last comment on the previous page.

[sebastianlacuesta]

I guess that Microsoft bet would be not with Linux, but with any *BSD.
Microkernel based, GPL free. Perfect for a fork in a closed source form.

[fuzz]

Yes, Windows Forms is a wrapper around Win32 API, but it doesn't make it not portable. In fact, it was more portable than WPF or UWP.

https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/#history

Anyway, I used WinForms under Mono under Linux about 8-10 years ago. It somehow worked, but the layout was very buggy.

As for WPF, we only had the Olive project, which was very incomplete.

https://www.mono-project.com/archived/olive/

A subset of the WPF APIs was used in Moonlight, the open source Silverlight implementation.

https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/wpf/

Today we have Avalonia - a WPF-inspired cross-platform XAML-based UI.

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

When it comes to cross-platform GUIs for .Net/Mono, we currently have several solutions:
- Gtk# (Gtk+ bindings for Mono): https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/gtksharp https://github.com/mono/gtk-sharp
- Xwt (with three backends: Gtk#, WPF and MonoMac): https://github.com/mono/xwt/wiki/Overview
- Xamarin.Forms (primarily for mobile, but also has a backend for Gtk+): https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/forms-gtk-progress
- Eto.Forms (backends: Gtk+2, Gtk+3, WinForms over GDI+, WinForms over Direct2D, WPF, MonoMac, Xamarin.Mac, iOS, Android): https://github.com/picoe/Eto

There is also this:

https://platform.uno/

[Weasel]

Pretty soon now, Microsoft is going to abandon the Windows Kernel and move Windows 10 rather seemlessly onto the Linux kernel and a Wayland display server. I can assure you that it will happen fairly soon and that Microsoft is going to implement the Windows look/feel on Wayland, it will look like the current UI but the underlying architecture will be Wayland and Linux. This will include an improved NTFS driver for Linux and the Win32/64 and DIrectX code being ported over to Wayland rendering backend, ensuring compatability for Windows apps on the new Linux based Windows.

You can't port the Win32 code over to Wayland because Wayland is some hot garbage lacking essential features by design. (i.e. it's a WONTFIX rather than a "submit a patch and we'll ignore it" thing)

Blind fanboys.

[Weasel]

I puked in my mouth.

Microsoft will never switch its main kernel to Linux, Microsoft bends over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility at kernel level, the complete opposite of Linux.

It's the complete opposite. The linux kernel interfaces to userland maintain perfect backwards compatibility. Windows doesn't, the syscalls change often, that's why you are required to use the userland APIs from kernel32 for example.

That said, the Linux userland (which is not technically Linux but eh) is indeed what you describe: a fragile clusterfuck of library ABIs/APIs that change more often than some people change their socks.

[tildearrow]

You can't port the Win32 code over to Wayland because Wayland is some hot garbage lacking essential features by design. (i.e. it's a WONTFIX rather than a "submit a patch and we'll ignore it" thing)

Blind fanboys.

Isn't Wayland extensible? Maybe Microsoft adds some vendor-specific protocols in the same way KDE did for SSD.

[board]

Delete this page?

https://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/wpf/