Porting a Prism-based WPF application to .NET Core

Question

We have a Prism-based WPF application with over 10 man years of development invested in it.

We are moving big chunks of it into web browser control hosted modules to make it platform independent in the future.

There seems to be no UI framework to take over XAML in .NET Core.

Would it be possible to port it into .NET Core in the future?

Answer 1

It's looking like WPF or at the very least XAML will become part of .NET Standard 2.0 roughly Q1 2017 / Q2 2017

Immo Landwerth - Program manager on .NET at Microsoft https://twitter.com/MikeEEE76/status/776769805722521600

Bug - Port System.Xaml to .NET Core #5766 https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/5766

.NET Core Roadmap https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/07/15/net-core-roadmap/

Answer 2

I am updating this answer as new .NET Core 3 and .NET Framework 4.8 are releasing with support of Windows Desktop Applications.

There is an update regarding .NET Core 3 and .NET Framework 4.8:

Update on .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8

Announcement of .NET 5 as ".NET Core vNext", the next release after .NET Core 3.0. In this announcement, Microsoft shows .NET 5 as a unifying platform for desktop, Web, cloud, mobile, gaming, IoT, and AI applications. It also shows explicit integration with all Visual Studio editions and with the command line interface (CLI). The goal of the new .NET version is to produce a single .NET runtime and framework, cross-platform, integrating the best features of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono (the original cross-platform implementation of .NET). .NET 5 also features Java interoperability on all platforms and interoperability with Objective-C and Swift on multiple operating systems.

Image source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/

Still, it is clear that all future investments in .NET will be related with .NET Core, and that .NET 5 is the next step forward with .NET Core. All related development will continue to be open-source and community-oriented. The production release of .NET Core is scheduled to later this year, in September, and .NET 5 is expected on late 2020. The current .NET Core roadmap is available here.

Image source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/