sorting Blazor, Photino, Uno and Avalonia
This is my first bit of prose officially recognizing that something has happened in the .NET desktop GUI space after the fall of the .NET Framework. There is life after WPF and here is one awakening to a new, cross-platform world.
Avalonia
The Avalonia space is about taking the W out of WPF. It is a direct replacement of WPF —without recognizing the existence of the Universal Windows Platform. To choose Avalonia is to embrace a XAML-based client for an existing back-end on a classic desktop. My dabbling with Avalonia shows me it is preserving the classic MVVM pattern—and it supports F♯!
The JetBrains folks actually like Avalonia:
Building Engaging Cross Platform Applications using Rider and Avalonia
Getting started with Avalonia and ReactiveUI
Photino
Once the novelty of releasing >100 MB applications with Electron.NET wears off, Photino (https://www.tryphotino.io) is the fundamental particle we need to have a slimmed-down sub-feature-set of Electron. The fact that there is a Photino.Blazor project strongly suggests that there can be a Bolero flavor of Photino.
Photino in Six Minutes
Photino is considered by Steve Sanderson the successor of his use of WebWindow (see “Meet WebWindow, a cross-platform webview library for .NET Core”). This might mean that Loïc “Tarmil” Denuzière will follow up “Desktop applications with Bolero and WebWindow” with an entry for Photino. #to-do
Uno
The Uno Platform defines cross-platform like how .NET MAUI defines cross-platform: one solution for mobile platforms first (and maybe some non-Windows, non-Mac desktops later).
Andres Pineda - Understanding and Developing WebAssembly Apps with Uno Platform
Blazor Hybrid
The interesting thing about Blazor Hybrid is its hybrid meshing with .NET MAUI and WPF. This approach can be regarded as Microsoft taking responsibility for the Windows platform (and its mobile concerns inspired by the iPhone and Samsung) which quietly implies the Linux desktop is left unattended.
The .NET Core Podcast interviews everybody
The .NET Core Podcast has a whole category of interviews about Blazor and then drills down into: