Issue with VueDesktop Gist App

1

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.

2

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:
https://www.vuedesktop.com/publishing-desktop-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.