Introducing AlterNET UI
We want to announce the very first beta of AlterNET UI - a cross-platform .NET UI Framework that allows the creation of desktop interfaces with .NET development tools that work and look native under Windows, macOS, and Linux.
It took two decades for Microsoft to make .NET Framework available on platforms other than Windows. Finally, with .NET 5.0, this happened - now, .NET can run on all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
With this major release, .NET developers can use their skills to create GUI desktop applications that run on these platforms or reuse their existing UI code to build cross-platform applications.
We started looking at it from the perspective of supporting our AlterNET Studio components and controls to work on macOS and Linux; however, we quickly realized that Windows Forms and WPF are still only supported for Windows platforms. It means that if someone needs to create productivity desktop applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and alike, they would need to use a third-party cross-platform UI library.
We then researched existing cross-platform solutions such as JavaFX, Electron, Qt, and AvaloniaUI. The latter seems to be the only one that can be integrated with .NET; however, the UI controls created with it will not look like native elements on a target platform.
Microsoft has also announced its plans to develop .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI), which evolves from Xamarin Forms. This framework is heavily leaned toward creating user interfaces on mobile devices at this stage.
That led us to develop our own cross-platform .NET UI desktop framework that can provide a native look for Windows, macOS, and Linux desktop applications.
As MAUI development continues and the desktop target is supported, we will look at making our control library compatible with this framework.
We believe this UI framework will help .NET developers to utilize their skills towards developing desktop GUI applications for different platforms, such as macOS, or create truly cross-platform applications with .NET.
On top of the UI framework, we have developed a Visual Studio extension that allows developers to design visual user Interfaces inside the IDE. With an approach similar to Windows Forms and WPF form visual design tools, this provides maximum productivity for application development.
AlterNET UI will be released under the MIT license, with the full source code, including the source code of the platform abstraction layer and Visual Studio extension.
We aim to release the first public version in the 1st quarter of 2023. Subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned for more AlterNET UI news.
