In my write up on Avalonia first impressions one of the things I was most missing was a full IntelliSense/Auto-complete style system for the Avalonia XAML and the ability to create components in the IDE on Linux. “The IDE” in both of those cases was the one I had focused on which was JetBrain’s Rider IDE. When I originally wrote the article I thought there was no alternative so I’d have to use a workflow akin to doing it in a pure text editor. However as I was in the middle of editing I discovered that the Avalonia developers are actually working on a full IDE built with Avalonia called AvalonStudio. While it is in heavy development in beta and missing some key features because if it I have to say it is impressive how many features it has and how well it works already. Could it replace Rider for .NET development right now? No. Could it eventually? Maybe, but that’s not why it is interesting to me. It’s interesting to me because it has the facilities I sorely wanted in Rider but found missing: XAML IntelliSense (and preview!) and Avalonia component creation with proper namespace behaviors. So how does one go about running it?

I’ve documented the first forays into doing cross-platform .NET development with Avalonia. I’ve stated that I’m overall impressed. However what are my deeper thoughts on it?

As I wrote in my Avalonia Hello World (On Linux) article I’ve made more progress than just executing the canned auto-generated Hello World. I’ve actually been through their one official tutorial and then some. You can find it on their website here. It will walk you through the steps of making a simple proof of concept “To Do List” application which shows you all of the steps of creating a simple application, adding controls, creating reactive controls, and how the Avalonia System works. It has two paths. One for those using Visual Studio on Windows and another for those using the .NET Core command line tools. Since I’m sticking with the whole doing everything on Linux thing I’m using the latter.

As I pick up doing cross-platform application desktop application development using AvaloniaUI I need to go through the obligatory hurdles of the “Hello World” program and following tutorials. I figure why not document them here for others too. Fortunately they actually provide some pretty solid getting started and tutorial guidelines so this should be more considered my personal notebook of those.

In my 2018 attempts at ditching the walled gardens I made a bunch of progress, which I’ve since backslid from, on replacing Google services with Kolab Lab’s offerings. I want to have the benefits of GMail, Google Drive, etc. but I would rather not have Google owning all of my data. At the same time I’m not going to fall on my sword and go back to mid-1990s infrastructure a la Richard Stallman either. Self hosting these things is a daunting task which I considered to be way out of the reach of this software developer. I thought that anyway until I ran across the FOSDEM session on the YunoHost system, which makes self-hosting a much more out of the box experience. Could this be the solution to my problem?