Is there a cross-platform GUI framework for C#/.NET?

Question

Let's say just for the joy of it, I decide that I don't want to write desktop applications in Java any more, instead want to switch to using C#. I want to be able to build an application that will run on some mainstream Linux distribution, and a recent release of MS Windows. It will have a GUI component.

In Java I can build an application that uses Swing. Once I have it working, I can copy that jar file from Windows to Linux or vice versa, depending where I developed it. And it will generally run with java -jar myapp.jar.

In C# is it possible to do this? Is there a functional equivalent to Swing or AWT in C#?

Answer 1

There's Eto.Forms (on github), which is an abstraction layer on top of WPF, WinForms, GTK, and MonoMac/Cocoa - so you can get a native UI on all platforms without having to re-implement for each platform. You don't have to suffer from lowest common denominator, since you can implement specifics for each platform (if desired, but not required).

It has an advantage that it is pure .NET and only relies on OS-supplied dependencies, as opposed to using GTK or WxWidgets where you'd have to bundle the native binaries for various platforms.