Overview

.NET

Stacks10.3K

Followers5.9K

Votes1.9K

GitHub Stars21.7K

Forks4.9K

Avalonia

Stacks27

Followers113

Votes0

GitHub Stars29.1K

Forks2.5K

.NET vs Avalonia: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this markdown, we will provide a comparison between .NET and Avalonia and highlight the key differences between the two frameworks.

Language Compatibility: The first key difference between .NET and Avalonia lies in their language compatibility. .NET is primarily designed to work with C# and VB.NET, while Avalonia supports a broader range of languages such as C#, F#, VB.NET, and even Python. This makes Avalonia a more versatile framework for developers who prefer using different programming languages.
Cross-Platform Support: Another significant difference is the level of cross-platform support provided by .NET and Avalonia. While .NET is known for its cross-platform capabilities, with the introduction of .NET Core, Avalonia takes it a step further. Avalonia provides a truly platform-agnostic approach, allowing developers to build applications that can run seamlessly on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems, making it an ideal choice for developing cross-platform applications.
Rendering Engine: One of the key differences between .NET and Avalonia lies in their rendering engines. .NET primarily relies on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for rendering user interfaces, which is a mature and feature-rich technology but limited to the Windows platform. On the other hand, Avalonia uses a custom-built rendering engine that is designed to work across multiple platforms, providing a consistent look and feel irrespective of the operating system, making it perfect for creating visually appealing and responsive user interfaces.
Community and Ecosystem: The .NET ecosystem has been around for a long time and has a large community of developers, extensive documentation, and a wide range of third-party libraries and frameworks to support development. Avalonia, while growing rapidly, has a smaller community and ecosystem in comparison. This means that developers using .NET will have a larger pool of resources and support available, whereas those using Avalonia might need to rely more on self-help and community contributions.
XAML Support: .NET has a strong support for XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language), which allows developers to define the user interface and behaviors in a declarative manner. This makes the development of user interfaces faster and easier. While Avalonia also supports XAML, it has its own unique dialect called Avalonia Markup Language (AML). This means that developers familiar with XAML will need to make some adjustments when working with Avalonia, as there are differences between XAML and AML syntax.
Target Audience: The target audience for .NET and Avalonia also differs. .NET has a broader user base and is suitable for a wide range of applications, including desktop, web, mobile, and gaming. Avaolonia, on the other hand, is specifically aimed at cross-platform desktop application development, making it an ideal choice for developers who want to build applications that can run on multiple operating systems and have a rich user interface.

In Summary, .NET and Avalonia differ in terms of language compatibility, cross-platform support, rendering engine, community and ecosystem, XAML support, and target audience.

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Advice on .NET, Avalonia

Ing. Alvaro

Software Systems Engineer at Ripio

Nov 28, 2020

Decided

I was considering focusing on learning RoR and looking for a work that uses those techs.

After some investigation, I decided to stay with C# .NET:

It is more requested on job positions (7 to 1 in my personal searches average).
It's been around for longer.
it has better documentation and community.
One of Ruby advantages (its amazing community gems, that allows to quickly build parts of your systems by merely putting together third party components) gets quite complicated to use and maintain in huge applications, where building and reusing your own components may become a better approach.
Rail's front end support is starting to waver.
C# .NET code is far easier to understand, debug and maintain. Although certainly not easier to learn from scratch.
Though Rails has an excellent programming speed, C# tends to get the upper hand in long term projects.

I would avise to stick to rails when building small projects, and switching to C# for more long term ones.

Opinions are welcome!

399k views399k

Comments

Ing. Alvaro

Software Systems Engineer at Ripio

May 21, 2020

Decided

Decided to change all my stack to microsoft technologies for they behave just great together. It is very easy to set up and deploy projects using visual studio and azure. Visual studio is also an amazing IDE, if not the best, when used for C#, it allows you to work in every aspect of your software.

Visual studio templates for ASP.NET MVC are the best I've found compared to django, rails, laravel, and others.

524k views524k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

.NET	Avalonia
.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.	Avalonia is a multi-platform windowing toolkit - somewhat like WPF - that is intended to be multi- platform. It supports XAML, lookless controls and a flexible styling system, and runs on Windows using Direct2D and other operating systems using Gtk & Cairo.
Multiple languages: You can write .NET apps in C#, F#, or Visual Basic.; Cross Platform: Whether you're working in C#, F#, or Visual Basic, your code will run natively on any compatible OS.; Consistent API & Libraries: To extend functionality, Microsoft and others maintain a healthy package ecosystem built on .NET Standard.; Application models for web, mobile, games and more: You can build many types of apps with .NET. Some are cross-platform, and some target a specific OS or .NET implementation.; Choose your tools: The Visual Studio product family provides a great .NET development experience on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Or if you prefer, there are .NET command line tools and plugins.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 21.7K	GitHub Stars 29.1K
GitHub Forks 4.9K	GitHub Forks 2.5K
Stacks 10.3K	Stacks 27
Followers 5.9K	Followers 113
Votes 1.9K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 273 Tight integration with visual studio 262 Stable code 191 Great community 184 Reliable and strongly typed server side language. 141 Microsoft Cons 13 C# 12 Too expensive to deploy and maintain 8 Microsoft dependable systems 8 Microsoft itself 5 Hard learning curve	No community feedback yet
Integrations
C# Microsoft Azure F# Xamarin Visual Basic	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to .NET, Avalonia?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

.NET vs Avalonia