Porting WinForms app on mac or just develop it again?

Question

I've developed a WinForms application with C# in Visual Studio on Windows and I need a version for macOS but I don't know which way is the best. I also have a Mac machine so don't have problems about the compiler: I already used VS2017 with integrated Xamarin to develop an iOS app using my mac as the required build server but didn't find any such method for developing a Mac desktop application. NET core only works with console application and even Visual Studio for Mac is different from Visual Studio for Windows and doesn't provide any visual designer. Am I forced to redo the whole application using an Apple product?

Answer 1

There are multiple solutions to building desktop apps targeting a Mac using .NET.

Mono is an alternative implementation of the .NET Framework that reimplements the underlying Windows API calls that Win Forms makes. It's probably the most straightfoward way to port an existing Win Forms app to Mac.

ElectronNET is a combination of Electron and .NET. Electron provides a desktop development framework combining a Chromium rendering engine with NodeJS. It's best if you have a lot of familiarity with web development. It's notable that major companies that want to build cross platform apps are using Electron (Visual Studio Code, Slack, Atom etc) so those with the time to invest in researching how to do a cross platform app seem to choose this option.

Avalonia is a .NET desktop framework that is inspired by WPF, but it's cross platform.

So no, you aren't forced to redo your application. Hopefully you've done a good job of separating UI logic from business logic, which will make using one of these other technologies easier.

Note that even though .NET Core 3 (which is cross platform) has support for Win Forms and WPF, that functionality will only be working on Windows. Win Forms still depends on the underlying Windows APIs, and WPF still depends on DirectX.