Sorry for two posts in one day, tried checkout the Gist Desktop Apps you have.
I’ve done the following:
mkdir ProjectName
cd ProjectName
app new vue-desktop ProjectName
dotnet build
app bin\Debug\net5\ProjectName.dll
It launches a Desktop window but it is blank.
Then launching into VSCode with code . and pressing F5, it loads a web browser and not the desktop app, but the browser is also blank.
As an aside - what is your thoughts on Blazor desktop apps? Such as those in MobileBlazerBindings and the soon to be .NET 6 Blazor Hybrid apps?
Having spent a couple months with UWP, moving into WinUI 3.0 in Win32, both of which are an absolute nightmare, I’m looking for something I can develop mostly in C#, render in HTML, but still use some JS/TS libraries for drawing (Skia) when required.
The Vue Desktop video shows how to run and publish the app
During development you can run TypeScript
Watch and dotnet run in different terminals to develop your App in a Web Browser:
$ tsc -w
$ dotnet run
To run your app in a Desktop App locally, pack it then run from the published dist/ folder:
$ npm run pack-app
$ cd dist
$ app
The docs contains different ways of publishing Apps:
I don’t believe in Blazor WASM, a metric tone of extra complexity just to run C# in a browser renderer which I consider self-defeating as IMO TypeScript + SPA fxs are much more productive. I’m also not a fan of C# in AOT environments due to productivity lost trying to diagnose runtime issues in iOS. I also very much dislike XAML so generally have not been a fan of C# for mobile or Desktop UIs.
If I need to run on iOS/Android + Desktop, Flutter is definitely my #1 pick, has a nicer reactive dev UX, better Lang for AOT + dart2js for Web, native skia rendering, a lot more resources devoted to it and a much larger ecosystem.
If I just needed to do a Desktop App I’d use our Vue Desktop template as we’ve done for ServiceStack Studio as Vue + .ts is much more productive than anything XAML, if I didn’t need a C# backend I’d use Electron.
