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.Net Conf is currently underway and I learnt about something called Avalonia UI. (I use .NET MAUI) After doing some research, Avalonia UI was primarily a desktop UI framework that now supports Android and iOS.

Since they're both dotNet foundation projects, why are they developing two different multi-platform frameworks? Are there obvious advantages of one over the other since they both use XAML and C# code?

Tanaka Mawere
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  • About advantages, Avalonia provides support for Linux (and web, but not officially yet) while MAUI doesn't – radoslawik Nov 09 '22 at 08:37
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    Avalonia UI is an open-source project developed for almost a decade. It isn't from Microsoft at all; instead, it's been built by the community, for the community. The accepted answer from Gerald isn't correct, as Avalonia UI and MAUI aren't competitors. They've been collaborating to create the MAUI Avalonia Hybrid. – Mike James Nov 15 '22 at 15:13

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Microsoft does not have that. Avalonia UI is based on Microsoft technology but it's a different company. Basically they are a competitor to .NET MAUI but there is also some collaboration between these two projects, which makes sense as they follow a different paradigm.

The .NET Foundation is something that definitely has close ties with Microsoft, but technically isn't Microsoft. .NET Foundation does a lot of things, but one of them is make sure that open-source projects keep being maintained.

A lot of open-source projects rely on people from the community that do work in their free time. Sometimes things happen and they don't have any time to work on it anymore. Instead of the project going to waste, the .NET Foundation is there to make sure it can be continued, among other things.

So all projects that fall under the .NET Foundation can very much be competitors and all sort of projects, but it's not necessarily developed by Microsoft. And of course we're all friends after all, it's just tech <3

Hope this clears it up a bit.

Gerald Versluis
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