I’ve been exploring AvaloniaUI, which has matured quite a bit in the last few years. They are preparing to offer a collection of tools under subscription pricing as part of business model to support the OSS project. This is tentatively called Avalonia Accelerate, and among other tools will include a drag-and-drop designer and application packager supporting Mac and Linux.
Refreshingly, they transparently put this plan in front of the community a few months ago and have been hosting an open discussion: Request for feedback - Avalonia Accelerate · AvaloniaUI/Avalonia · Discussion #16997 . There’s a survey they are using to collect community feedback, and they have also posted some initial results, indicating, for example, a sweet spot between EU150-200 for the initial subscription, though this would go up as more features are added (but with some price protection for early adopters).
I first saw this in their 2024 year-in-review piece here: Avalonia UI in 2024: Growth, Challenges, and the Road Ahead . For those following the Xojo bug tracking conversation, this post provides some data on Avalonia’s bug count and approach to managing them, again completely transparently. I’m not sure how AvaloniaUI compares in size to Xojo, but certainly seems like a different perspective on both bugs and community engagement for what will ultimately be a similar, if considerably more robust, toolset. I’d probably pay for that alone; looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
But to use it one will have to install Visual Studio which is a space and memory hog and very show on my old PC. So in spite of being such a good product it is a no go for me.
You don’t need VisualStudio; it “supports” VS, VSCode and Rider ( Install | Avalonia Docs), but I think by support, they mean “we have extra pieces that work with these tools in particular”. The reality is, you can use it with any editor and the command line .Net tools, if you like.
The open source project, which is what you get now, will continue. Everything you need.
XPF, which is their layer that translates existing WPF-based programs into Avalonia (AvaloniaUI is WPF-inspired, but not an exact duplicate of the API. Close enough that a shim – XPF – can make it, apparently, very easy to port your app). This will continue as a paid product.
The forthcoming collection of tools, Avalonia Accelerate, also paid (subscription pricing TBD)
There’s also paid support, and it looks like they’ll do dev projects, too.
No, sorry – XPF and Accelerate, along with support, will provide the funding for the OSS project. They do a pretty good job of justifying their approach to this business model in the linked posts, and you can see how much they are making. XPF was about 50% of their revenue.
What do you typically use Visual Studio for? (or did anyway). I have used Visual Studio since I went from Visual FoxPro to .NET a quarter century ago and have never found it slow except in two specific circumstances:
Heavily edited .cs file with hundreds or thousands of lines and scores of methods (usually some catchall scratch file of proofs of concept, nothing production) can become a bit sluggish after a few hours of work – solved by stopping and restarting that VS instance
Winforms designer can become slow with, like, around 100+ controls in one form. Helped by a stop/restart and by not creating a single form app with 25 tabs and lots of controls on all the tabs. Reason for this, as mentioned in another post, is that WinForms designer runs in a special sandbox under .NET framework (rather than .NET Core). It’s a legacy thing that they aren’t investing enough resources in retiring techincal debt and moving it forward.
Apart from those I find it well worth everything it provides and much prefer it to VS Code or other alternatives I’ve tried. The debugger itself is generally epic and better than anything I’ve used anywhere else.
I’m sure there are workflows I haven’t touched that could be a different story; I have mostly written C# (and some years back, a fair bit of VB.NET) services and console apps, and some traditional WinForms admin apps with it. It’s been a long time since I did (traditional) ASP.NET but it was pretty fast at that also.
Something else that might influence my experience is that I have always run on boxes with 32G or RAM or more, and at least 8 cores. That is what my last 20 year’s worth of clients have provided me (and running Windows Server). Locally I have 64G of RAM and an M2 Apple Silicon, running Windows VM at 16G but haven’t tried running Visual Studio in there; instead I run the native MacOS version of Ryder which I find excellent also.
· AvaloniaUI/Avalonia · Discussion #16997 . There’s a survey they are using to collect community feedback, and they have also posted some initial results, indicating, for example, a sweet spot between EU150-200 for the initial subscription, though this would go up as more features are added (but with some price protection for early adopters).
