I have a medium sized C/C++ Qt application that uses some win32 API functions. I compiled for release and created a directory that contains all the needed DLLs and resources files needed. I tested it on other machines and it works fine.
Now my question is.. how to package such application so that I can put it on microsoft store? Note that it is not a UWP app and it uses some functions from win32.
You can use the Professional edition of Advanced Installer (it has Visual Studio integration) and create an MSIX package ready for the Windows Store.
Here is an article that takes you through the MS Store publishing steps
Also, an article that explains how to build and MSIX package using Advanced Installer's VS extension
Disclaimer. I work on the team building Advanced Installer.
I have been developing Windows Forms programs for few years. I am now looking into .NET Core (including ASP.NET Core MVC). I am searching for the new GUI desktop technology. In Visual Studio 2015 update 3 I can't see any option to make a GUI app in .NET Core.
What am I missing?
You were not missing anything. Microsoft shipped no reasonable way to create GUI applications directly using .NET Core until .NET Core 3, though UWP (Universal Windows Platform) is partially built on top of .NET Core.
.NET Core 3.0 includes support for Windows Forms and WPF, though it is Windows-only.
.NET 6 will include .NET MAUI, which will support Windows and macOS desktop applications and mobile applications, with Linux desktop applications supported by the community (not MS). .NET 5 will include a preview version of .NET MAUI.
For third-party cross platform options, see other answers.
AvaloniaUI now has support for running on top of .NET Core on Windows, OS X, and Linux. XAML, bindings and control templates included.
E.g. to develop on macOS with Rider:
Follow instructions to install the Avalonia dotnet new templates
Open JetBrains Rider and from the Welcome screen,
Choose New Solution → (near the top of the Templates List) → More Templates → Button Install Template...* → browse to the directory where you cloned the templates at step 1.
Click the Reload Button
Behold! Avalonia Templates now appear in the New Solution Templates List!
Choose an Avalonia template
Build and run. See the GUI open before your eyes.
You could use Electron and wire it up with Edge.js resp. electron-edge. Edge.js allows Electron (Node.js) to call .NET DLL files and vice versa.
This way you can write the GUI with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the backend with .NET Core. Electron itself is also cross platform and based on the Chromium browser.
It is now possible to use Qt, QtQuick, and QML with .NET Core, using Qml.Net.
It is highly performant (not "P/Invoke chatty"), fully featured and works across Linux, OS X, and Windows.
Check out my blog post to see how it compares to the other options out there currently.
PS: I'm the author.
For creating a console-based UI, you can use gui.cs. It is open-source (from Miguel de Icaza, creator of Xamarin), and runs on .NET Core on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
It has the following components:
Buttons
Labels
Text entry
Text view
Time editing field
Radio buttons
Checkboxes
Dialog boxes
Message boxes
Windows
Menus
ListViews
Frames
ProgressBars
Scroll views and Scrollbars
Hexadecimal viewer/editor (HexView)
Sample screenshot
One option would be using Electron with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for UI and build a .NET Core console application that will self-host a web API for back-end logic. Electron will start the console application in the background that will expose a service on localhost:xxxx.
This way you can implement all back-end logic using .NET to be accessible through HTTP requests from JavaScript.
Take a look at this post, it explains how to build a cross-platform desktop application with Electron and .NET Core and check code on GitHub.
Yes, it is possible.
.NET Core doesn't have any components for native GUI application out of the box. However, there is a NuGet package for it that is called Electron.NET, as per Gregor Biswanger's answer.
Electron is a framework that allows you to build native GUI applications on top of Node.js. Electron.NET is a NuGet package that allows you to utilise Electron and Node.js from within your .NET Core code.
The good news is that you don't have to learn JavaScript, Electron or Node.js in order to be able to use the NuGet package. JS files do run inside your application, but they get automatically generated by the build process.
All you do is build a pretty standard ASP.NET Core MVC app. The only difference is that, instead of running in the browser, it runs as a native windowed app. Besides just a few lines of code specific to the Electron.NET package, you won't need to learn anything above ASP.NET Core MVC.
This page provides a tutorial on how to use it. It also contains some links to sample code repositories.
.NET Core 3 will have support for creating Windows desktop applications. I watched a demo of the technology yesterday during the .NET Conference.
This is the only blog post I could find, but it does illustrate the point: .NET Core 3 and Support for Windows Desktop Applications
I'm working on a project that might help: https://github.com/gkmo/CarloSharp
The following application is written in .NET with the UI in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (Angular).
tl;dr - I'm not sure that it would be possible for the .NET Core developers to supply a cross-platform GUI framework.
I feel like expecting a cross-platform GUI framework to be bundled into the official tooling (especially an old version of the tooling - you mention that you're running Visual Studio 2015 update 3) for an early version of .NET Core is a little premature.
GUI frameworks are really quite heavy, and dependent on the hardware abstractions already present on the host machine. On Windows, there is generally a single window manager (WM) and desktop environment (DE) used by most users, but on the many different distributions of Linux which are supported, there are any number of possible WMs and DEs - granted most users will either be using X-Server or Wayland in combination with KDE, GNOME or Xfce. But no Linux installation ever is the same.
The fact that the open source community can't really settle on a "standard" setup for a VM and DE means that it would be pretty difficult for the .NET Core developers to create a GUI framework which would work across all platforms and combinations of DEs and WMs.
A lot of folks here have some great suggestions (from use ASP.NET Core to builds a Web application and use a browser to listing a bunch of cross-platform frameworks). If you take a look at some of the mentioned cross platform GUI frameworks listed, you'll see how heavy they are.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel as Miguel de Icaza showed off Xamarin running naively on Linux and macOS at .NET Conf this year (2017, if you're reading this in the future), so it might be worth trying that when it's ready.
(But you'll need to upgrade from Visual Studio 2015 to Visual Studio 2017 to access the .NET Core 2.0 features.)
You could develop a web application with .NET Core and MVC and encapsulate it in a Windows universal JavaScript app: Progressive Web Apps on Windows
It is still a web application, but it's a very lightweight way to transform a web application into a desktop app without learning a new framework or/and redevelop the UI, and it works great.
The inconvenience is unlike Electron or ReactXP for example, the result is a universal Windows application and not a cross platform desktop application.
I have been searching for this for ages now and none of the solution above are to my satisfaction.
I ended up working with https://github.com/mellinoe/ImGui.NET for now.
I can confirm it works at least across macos and win10 and claims to be compatible with linux.
Leaving this here in case it can help someone.
It will be available using .NET 6:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-6-preview-1/
But you can already create WinForms applications using netcore 3.1 and net 5 (at least in Visual Studio 2019 16.8.4+).
For the special case of existing Windows Forms applications:
There is a way - though I don't know how well it works.
It goes like this:
Take the Windows Forms implementation from Mono.
Port it to .NET Core or NetStandard.
Recompile your Windows Forms applications against the new System.Windows.Forms.
Fix anything that may be broken by .NET Core.
Pray that mono implements the parts you need flawlessly.
(If it doesn't, you can always stop praying, and send the Mono project a pull request with your fix/patch/feature.)
Here's my CoreFX Windows Forms repository:
https://github.com/ststeiger/System.CoreFX.Forms
Yes, it is possible to develop cross-platform desktop (GUI) applications, for Windows, Linux and macOS, using Visual Studio Code, .NET Core, C#, GTK 3, gtksharp and Glade as the GUI designer.
Here is how.
Windows Forms (and its visual designer) have been available for .NET Core (as a preview) since Visual Studio 2019 16.6. It's quite good, although sometimes I need to open Visual Studio 2019 16.7 Preview to get around annoying bugs.
See this blog post: Windows Forms Designer for .NET Core Released
Also, Windows Forms is now open source: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms
If you are using .NET Core 3.0 and above, do the following steps and you are good to go: (I'm going to use .NET Core CLI, but you can use Visual Studio too):
md MyWinFormsApp optional step
cd MyWinFormsApp optional step
dotnet new sln -n MyWinFormsApp optional step, but it's a good idea
dotnet new winforms -n MyWinFormsApp I'm sorry, this is not optional
dotnet sln add MyWinFormsApp do this if you did step #3
Okay, you can stop reading my answer and start adding code to the MyWinFormsApp project. But if you want to work with Form Designer, keep reading.
Open up MyWinFormsApp.csproj file and change <TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.1<TargetFramework> to <TargetFrameworks>net472;netcoreapp3.1</TargetFrameworks> (if you are using netcoreapp3.0 don't worry. Change it to <TargetFrameworks>net472;netcoreapp3.0</TargetFrameworks>)
Then add the following ItemGroup
<ItemGroup Condition="'$(TargetFramework)' == 'net472'">
<Compile Update="Form1.cs">
<SubType>Form</SubType>
</Compile>
<Compile Update="Form1.Designer.cs">
<DependentUpon>Form1.cs</DependentUpon>
</Compile>
</ItemGroup>
After doing these steps, this is what you should end up with:
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WindowsDesktop">
<PropertyGroup>
<OutputType>WinExe</OutputType>
<TargetFrameworks>net472;netcoreapp3.1</TargetFrameworks>
<UseWindowsForms>true</UseWindowsForms>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup Condition="'$(TargetFramework)' == 'net472'">
<Compile Update="Form1.cs">
<SubType>Form</SubType>
</Compile>
<Compile Update="Form1.Designer.cs">
<DependentUpon>Form1.cs</DependentUpon>
</Compile>
</ItemGroup>
</Project>
Open up file Program.cs and add the following preprocessor-if
#if NETCOREAPP3_1
Application.SetHighDpiMode(HighDpiMode.SystemAware);
#endif
Now you can open the MyWinFormsApp project using Visual Studio 2019 (I think you can use Visual Studio 2017 too, but I'm not sure) and double click on Form1.cs and you should see this:
Okay, open up Toolbox (Ctrl + W, X) and start adding controls to your application and make it pretty.
You can read more about designer at Windows Forms .NET Core Designer.
I have already created Qt based application which uses some third-party open source library like OpenCV, I have looked Windows Dev Center and seems the all the reference is using Visual Studios and other Windows tool. I have created my App using Qt creator. Is it possible to submit such an application on Windows App store?
Any help will be appreciated,
Thanks
Haris
Bad news: Microsoft does not support Win32 apps on AppStore yet (but it has been announced, currently under development as "Project Centennial"). It looks like an "old-school" desktop applications cannot be submitted to the Windows App store.
Good news: Qt has support for WinRT (complete in Qt 5.6 which is currently in Beta and will be released in a few weeks). And qmake can generate a Visual Studio solution from your project (in case you need it for deployment or debugging; VS Community edition is free).
Qt WinRT tutorial: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/winrt-support.html
OpenCV in WinRT: https://msopentech.com/blog/2014/03/20/easily-build-opencv-powered-apps-for-windows-store/
I am having trouble getting my app to build for ARM target after adding the SQLite-WinRT database wrapper. I could reproduce this with a simple test app as follows:
(This is done in Visual Studio 2013.)
Create an empty Windows 8.1 universal app (WinRT)
Download SQLite for Windows Phone 8.1 and SQLite for Windows Runtime (Windows 8.1) using Tools/Extensions and Updates. Add them to the respective projects' references.
Using NuGet, add SQLite-WinRT package to each project.
Build for x86 (local machine or phone emulator) -> no problems.
Build for ARM (phone device) -> build error shown below (independent of debug or release builds).
There was a mismatch between the processor architecture of the project being built "ARM" and the processor architecture, "x86", of the implementation file "C:\Users\jr\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\sqlite-test\packages\Sqlite-Winrt.3.8.7.1\lib\wpa81\SQLiteWinRT.dll" for "C:\Users\jr\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\sqlite-test\packages\Sqlite-Winrt.3.8.7.1\lib\wpa81\SQLiteWinRT.winmd". This mismatch may cause runtime failures. Please consider changing the targeted processor architecture of your project through the Configuration Manager so as to align the processor architectures between your project and implementation file, or choose a winmd file with an implementation file that has a processor architecture which matches the targeted processor architecture of your project.
I posted a small test project here (Windows Phone 8.1 empty project, added SQLite, added SQLite-WinRT via NuGet).
Go to project properties open build tab and set target platform to ARM
Edit
You have added WinRt sqlite. it is buid on x86 and when you want to build it on ARM process Architecture it cannot build you need to remove WinRTSQlite dll than your project will work fine. Here is Code
Hope this helps
One workaround for the problems with the NuGet package is adding the sqlite-winrt sources to your phone or universal app.
install SQLite for Windows Phone 8.1 (and for universal also Windows Runtime (Windows 8.1)) in Tools -> Extensions and Updates if not done already
add references to the respective projects
download the sources for the sqlite-winrt wrapper
copy the SQLiteWinRTPhone81(RT) (and SQLiteWinRT81 if needed) folders to your solution
add the projects to your solution in Visual Studio (right-click on solution -> Add -> Existing Project)
add references to the respective projects
edit the references for the sqlite-winrt project(s) to point to the correct version of SQLite (right-click project -> Properties -> Common Porperties -> References): add a reference to the current SQLite version in your project and remove the old reference
build your solution
I have downloaded your project and on the references i have found that you are using SQLite-WinRT and sqlite for windows phone 8.1, you don't need both.
as soon as you remove SQLite-WinRT your project start compiling.
EDIT:
inside a universal app you have to add only the right references, if is a phone project just add sqlite for windows phone 8.1, instead on the windows 8.1 app add only the SQLite-WinRT
I have some issues with Sq lite. I read a Microsoft article
In that site it is mentioning as "When you create a new C# or VB Windows Store project in Visual Studio, it supports all architectures (x86, x64 and ARM) by default. But since you added Sq Lite to the project, you can’t build one package that targets all architectures. You have to build one target for each. Select Build|Configuration Manager and select x86, x64 or ARM from the Platform drop-down list."
My application is Newspaper app developed using C# for windows tablet. Can i build for all processors.?
Yes you can, the only downside is that you must compile three different times your app, to support the ARM, X86 and X&4 architectures.
This can done easily if you configure your configuration manager with the different architectures ;)
Check this link on How to: Create and Edit Configurations