Day 6

Hours Total: 11.5

Day Recap

Outcome: Decided to try Avalonia, motivated by Reddit posts suggesting that it's a more future-proof option compared to WinUI3. Successfully set up the environment and learned the basics of the MVVM pattern. Made good progress with the initial project setup.

What I Did

• Committed to Avalonia based on positive feedback from Reddit—seems like a better bet for long-term project stability.
  • One downside: Avalonia has fewer tutorials and resources compared to WinUI3, but it should be faster.
• Downloaded and installed .NET 8.0 for Windows.
• Installed the Avalonia template:
  bash

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  dotnet new install Avalonia.Templates
• Installed the Avalonia Visual Studio Extensions.
• Created a new project using the CLI:
  bash

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  dotnet new avalonia.mvvm -o MyProject 

What I Learned

• MVVM Pattern: Explored the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, which is core to Avalonia.
  • Learned how text binding works in XAML: connected a text variable to a TextBlock in the view.
• Followed a tutorial to add a button that:
  • Prints a debug message on click.
  • Accepts input from a textbox and performs some calculation based on that input.

Remarks

Avalonia feels promising. While it’s true that there aren’t as many tutorials or guides, the structure it provides with the MVVM pattern makes building UI apps logical and scalable. The binding system is intuitive, but the learning curve for more complex components might be steep.

Next Goals

• Continue learning more about Avalonia and the MVVM architecture.
• Add more interactive components to the project and explore more complex data bindings.
• Experiment with styling in Avalonia to see how customizable the UI can get.