Day 12

Hours worked/Total: 2/20

Day Recap

Attempted to add a button with an open file dialog but ran into several roadblocks, from unhelpful examples to cryptic errors. Managed to resolve the issue after hours of frustration—it came down to a missing pair of curly brackets and missing critical Nuget packages. lol.

What I Did

• Tried to implement a button that opens a file dialog.
  • Neither Copilot nor Claude could provide usable code—they kept suggesting approaches that didn’t work.
  • Couldn’t paste code from examples due to compatibility or version issues.
•  Discovered that many Avalonia example codes are outdated or incomplete:
  • For instance, the RelayCommand tag didn’t work until I installed the MVVM Toolkit NuGet package
• Spent an hour debugging a cryptic compiler error Internal compiler error while transforming node  
  Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
  • Turned out to be a simple mistake—I forgot curly brackets when binding the command to the button.

Remarks

• Avalonia’s ecosystem still feels unpolished. Many examples are outdated, poorly documented, or require extra NuGet packages that aren’t mentioned upfront. Debugging feels like a guessing game at times, with cryptic errors masking what are often trivial mistakes.

Next Goals

Complete the button functionality and ensure the file dialog opens successfully.