Buckle up friends! Microsoft is open sourcing WPF, Windows Forms (winforms), and WinUI, so the three major Windows UX technologies are going open source! All this is happening on the same day as .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 is announced. Madness! ;)

.NET Core 3 is a major update which adds support for building Windows desktop applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Entity Framework 6 (EF6). Note that .NET Core 3 continues to be open source and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, in containers, and in the cloud. In the case of WPF/WinForms/etc you'll be able to create apps for Windows that include (if you like) their own copy of .NET Core for a clean side-by-side install and even faster apps at run time. The Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI) is also being open sourced AND you can use these controls in any Windows UI framework.

That means your (or my!) WPF/WinForms/WinUI apps can all use the same controls if you like, using XAML Islands. I could take the now 10 year old BabySmash WPF app and add support for pens, improved touch, or whatever makes me happy!

WPF and Windows Forms projects are run under the .NET Foundation which also announced changes today and the community will guide foundation operations. The .NET Foundation is also changing its governance model by increasing the number of board members to 7, with just 1 appointed by Microsoft. The other board members will be voted on by the community! Anyone who has contributed to a .NET Foundation project can run, similar to how the Gnome Foundation works! Learn more about the .NET Foundation here.

On the runtime and versioning side, here's a really important point from the .NET blog that's worth emphasizing IMHO:

Know that if you have existing .NET Framework apps that there is not pressure to port them to .NET Core. We will be adding features to .NET Framework 4.8 to support new desktop scenarios. While we do recommend that new desktop apps should consider targeting .NET Core, the .NET Framework will keep the high compatibility bar and will provide support for your apps for a very long time to come.

I think of it this way. If you’ve got an existing app that you’re happy with, there is no reason to port this to .NET Core. Microsoft will support the .NET Framework for a very long time, given that it’s a part of Windows. But post .NET Framework 4.8. new features will usually only become available in .NET Core because Microsoft is drastically reducing the risk and thus rate of change for .NET Framework. So if you’re building a new app or you’re actively evolving an existing app you should really start looking at .NET Core. Porting to .NET Core certainly isn’t free, but it offers many benefits, such as better performance, XCOPY deployment for the framework itself, and feature set that is growing fast, thanks to open source. Choose the strategy that makes sense for your project and/or business.

I don't want to hear any of this "this is dead, only use that" nonsense. We just open sourced WinForms and have already taken Pull Requests. WinForms has been updated for 4k+ displays! WPF is open source, y'all! Think about the .NET Standard and how you can run standard libraries on .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Mono - or any ".NET" that's out there. Mono is enabling running .NET Standard libraries via WebAssembly. To be clear - your browser is now .NET Standard capable! There are open source projects like https://platform.uno/ and Avalonia and Ooui taking .NET in new and interesting places. Blazor makes Web UIs in .NET with (preview/experimental) client support with Web Assembly and server support included in .NET 3.0 with Razor Components. Only good things are coming, my friends!

.NET Core runs on Raspberry Pi and ARM processors! .NET Core supports serial ports, IoT devices, and there's even a System.Device.GPIO (General Purpose I/O) package! Go explore https://github.com/dotnet/iot to really get your head around how much cool stuff is happening in the .NET space.

I want to encourage you to go check out Matt Warren's extremely well-researched post "Open Source .NET - 4 years later" to get a real visceral sense of how far we've come as a community. You'll be amazed!

Now, go play!

Download .NET Core 3 Preview 1 on Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can see details of the release in the .NET Core 3 Preview 1 release notes

Visual Studio 2019 will support building .NET Core 3 applications and the VS2019 preview can be installed side by side with existing versions of VS.

Enjoy.

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