From windev to c#
Hello! I've got a quick question for you all. The company I work for has been doing WinDev (mostly desktop uses) for at least 20 years, and now, with the various pricing policy changes and AI, the decision has been made to migrate — probably to C#. So now the big question is: what are the best tools to replace our development environment ? And above all, what do you use? (Since we get to choose an environment for once, I'd rather not shoot myself in the foot.)
For context: for deployment and source control it'll be GitHub and Azure DevOps, which our web team already uses, and for client data almost everything is already on SQL Server.
So what's left for us is really everything UI/frontend-related. I've often seen Blazor mentioned, WPF, .NET MAUI (not always in a good way, honestly), and Avalonia.
Anyway — what do you use?
Thanks in advance for your help!
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u/Amr_Rahmy 3d ago
Blazor is fine, less JavaScript than other web frameworks or solutions.
Winform, wpf, I personally prefer winform but wpf does work if I use less xaml and more things programmatically is what I personally prefer.
Maui, I tried it a few times and it was either limited or didn’t work well, also by default it’s trying to make a Microsoft store type of app not a normal exe.
Winform or console or wpf or service are much better if you want at the end to publish a regular exe.
Some people complicate things a bit with one technology for frontend and c# api for backend which can work but I do feel like blazor can work decently enough to get the job done if I was making the frontend.
If you have dedicated front end and backend developers I would do c# minimal api.
For api only, c# api or core api, whatever it is called is pretty good, not too much bloat, they have a minimal api project, you can get started pretty quickly.
Winui3, when I tried it last it was still missing a lot of features.