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?

Update (26 Mar 2019): The repository does in fact have binary installers in the releases not just source code. The Debian installer installed correctly but made a bad menu shortcut. Otherwise the net effect was that it worked as well as the method below but with less trouble. The releases are here {:target="_blank}. The binaries are under the “Assets” drop down for each release. To run it you need to edit/create a shortcut to the below command or execute it on the command line:

NOTE: This article is from 2019 and Avalonia has been under active development and improvement since that time. Please consult newer tutorials and documentation for how to use this against current releases of Avalonia.

dotnet /opt/vitalelement/avalonstudio/bin/AvalonStudio.dll

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?

NOTE This article is from 2019 and Avalonia has been under active development and improvement since that time. Please consult newer tutorials and documentation for how to use this against current releases of Avalonia.

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.

NOTE: This article is from 2019 and Avalonia has been under active development and improvement since that time. Please consult newer tutorials and documentation for how to use this against current releases of Avalonia.

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.

NOTE: This article is from 2019 and Avalonia has been under active development and improvement since that time. Please consult newer tutorials and documentation for how to use this against current releases of Avalonia.

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?

After several months of dormancy in my software development activities I’ve started hitting a solid pace of getting back into the swing of things recently. As much as I wanted the next big thing for me to work on to be something Fediverse related, specifically Friendica, that has created a huge mental block for me. I wrote about that a lot in this post . I’m not a language snob, more on that below, but getting fired up about doing PHP work on that project isn’t happening. I still never got to the bottom of if it was more PHP or the inertia of getting started on the project. It doesn’t matter either way because I wasn’t getting anything done. I wasn’t sure if maybe it was a general lull. I think I’ve answered that question in the negative. So what is this looking like then?

Several years ago I wrote here that I was not going to go by any diet label. At the time I was more exasperated by the orthorexia of the whole thing. That was both internal and externally generated orthorexia. We can all say we don’t agree with labeling ourselves but it’s not a totally useless exercise. It’s a convenient way to compress down a lot of information into an easily identifiable and relatedable expression. Unfortunately it is also something which can lead to lots of false paths and lots of problems. In the past week I’ve run across several stories and instances which make me double down on that decision.

I took the deep dive into the Fediverse last year when I decided to bite off the Diaspora API development task with Frank Rousseau. It was a great experience and I had hoped to do a lot more Diaspora work. With a lot of the ActivityPub discussions and there being some really good questions about how that should work I had embarked on an experiment to see what a merged Fediverse Social Media experience would feel like. Friendica has tie-ins to Diaspora, ActivityPub, and many others. It was a great candidate for it. I am way behind on doing my write up but I have my notes. That’s for another post. This post is about a conundrum I’m facing with respect to my open source/Fediverse contribution conundrum. That conundrum is: I don’t know which project(s) I want to focus on any longer.