Consider to re-write the CiderPress II GUI using Dart

[wyatt-wong]

I refer to the CiderPress II - WPF GUI README file, as you already mentioned that the ultimate goal is to develop a multi-platform GUI application using some other tookit, I would advise you to consider re-write the CiderPress II GUI using Dart

[fadden]

The problem is that the GUI code needs to work with .NET libraries, and my 30 seconds of googling suggest that Dart and .NET don't really have a way to interact.

The GUI and CLI are both built on top of libraries that do all the work. The GUI code is all just user interaction.

It might be possible to take a different approach, and wrap the CLI with a native Mac/Linux GUI, but projects like that tend to be a bit rough.

In the mean time, there's Wine emulation.

[wyatt-wong]

You could separate the GUI for macOS and Linux using Dart and keep the existing WPF GUI for Windows. Wine emulation is NOT native for macOS and Linux and it is totally out of the question.

[rb6502]

Wine works quite smoothly these days. I have no trouble using CrossOver (the commercial version of Wine) to run CPII and a bunch of other things on my MacBook.

[fadden]

I've been including "Wine bottled" binaries for macOS in recent releases; CP2Mac107.zip from https://github.com/fadden/CiderPress2/releases/tag/v1.0.7 is functional if a bit clunky. I was very impressed to discover that drag & drop works.

If there's a good resource showing how to invoke .NET libraries from Dart, please include a link. I didn't find anything in my initial search. CP2 is 170K lines of C#, 22K of which is WPF GUI, so while making a Mac-specific GUI is reasonable, rewriting the rest isn't viable.

[wyatt-wong]

Wine works quite smoothly these days. I have no trouble using CrossOver (the commercial version of Wine) to run CPII and a bunch of other things on my MacBook.

No problem using it and working smoothly is very much different from running natively. You can also run macOS Applications compiled natively for Intel platform in Apple Silicon Mac with Rosetta2, but do you prefer this over native Apple Silicon Mac applications?

[wyatt-wong]

I've been including "Wine bottled" binaries for macOS in recent releases; CP2Mac107.zip from https://github.com/fadden/CiderPress2/releases/tag/v1.0.7 is functional if a bit clunky. I was very impressed to discover that drag & drop works.

If there's a good resource showing how to invoke .NET libraries from Dart, please include a link. I didn't find anything in my initial search. CP2 is 170K lines of C#, 22K of which is WPF GUI, so while making a Mac-specific GUI is reasonable, rewriting the rest isn't viable.

I am checking out converting the C# WPF GUI to Dart and other methods,but before that I need to run CiderPress II in Windows to see what the GUI looks like.

[wyatt-wong]

You may check out if the following:

Using Flutter to build a native-looking desktop app for macOS and Windows