Comment by bflesch 4 days ago
Sorry for the stupid question, but would this IDE be a good place to create VB.net GUI apps for Windows 11?
I've been looking into "best" ways of creating Windows GUI apps from Linux and apart from C/Cpp with native Windows APIs most options seem to focus on React Native and web technologies.
Is SimpleIDE a valid option for this? Does it spit out an .exe file that I can run on a vanilla Windows 11 installation?
Personally I love the web-tooling, they've abused the dynamicism of JS/TS for the benfit of developer experience to the point where others tools often feels cramping when wanting to do something really quickly.
And webviews are simple to start within some host language, I have my own mini-webview-host written in .NET that provides functions for file IO, file-selection dialogs,etc.
Outside of that, more serious seemingly still viable non-lowlevel (QT/GTK) non-web cross-platform options:
- Dart/flutter seems very popular, it's a new language to learn for most but seems to have been given the chance to mature and seems to be gaining.
- in the .NET world Avalonia (desktop focused, inheris a lot from WPF architecturally and has a paid crossplatform WPF shim)
- Also .NET, MAUI (better for more "mobile" like/focused designs).
- If you're doing games and are already rendering polygons, IMGui seems to be the go-to option.
- Lazarus (Pascal) seems to still carry the old VB/Delphi torch.
That said, what I'd love to see pesonally is for library developers to start looking at sane/fast ways to develop UI applications with modern language features to have non-insane state management. Either as thin shims over the existing lowlevel libraries or as first-class support.
C++ and Java has evolved a lot just in the past 10 years, as have some other languages.
But the web-focus seems to have left desktop UI development in a rut outside of new players for new languages.
If it doesn't have to be VB.NET, then JetBrains Rider (free for non-commercial development) + C# + Avalonia as the GUI framework will bring you the closest to your "best" way.
If it does, this SimpleIDE might be an option but also it might be so that the only good option would be Visual Studio... which requires Windows. But switching to it will give you two more options - WinForms and WPF - both are old but tested GUI frameworks.
No, I'm sorry, SimpleIDE was designed specifically for targeting Linux.
However, the guys on the Discord Visual Basic server have managed to spin it up on WSL.
> I've been looking into "best" ways of creating Windows GUI apps from Linux and apart from C/Cpp with native Windows APIs most options seem to focus on React Native and web technologies.
Have you considered Lazarus? I use it with plain C for the logic (not C++).
Oh, thanks for the pointer. I've seen it before but never used it. Can it compile a Windows exe file on my Linux system?
Edit: I can't seem to find a clear mention of cross-compilation on the lazarus website, and a web search points me to several free pascal wikis. On the Lazarus IDE website it mostly mentions that Lazarus IDE itself can run on both Windows and Linux. Ideally I'd do everything on Linux and ship an exe to Windows, but this seems to be very hard to do nowadays.
First search result: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Cross_compiling_for_Windows_unde...
I will be trying this later this week and can report back, if you like.
That this popped up on HN is fortunate, and oddly specific to my needs. I'm in a position where I have to support some legacy .NET software for the manufacturers we service and prefer working in Linux when and if possible, so this IDE seems targeted to me. Looking forward to giving it a shot and seeing if it replaces VSCodium in my routine.