Is WPF on Linux (already) possible?

Question

I love programming with .NET, especially C# 3.0, .NET 3.5 and WPF. But what I especially like is that with Mono .NET is really platform-independent.

Now I heard abou

Answer 1

You'll have better luck working with Moonlight, which targets the Silverlight API, which is a subset of full WPF.

edit: Sure, Silverlight isn't "intended" for the desktop, but there's no reason why you can't embed a silverlight engine in your application. It's been done before, such as for the Mac NY Times Reader

more edit: see Miguel's post on Standalone Silverlight Applications

Answer 2

Theoretically, a stripped version of WPF COULD be compiled against WinPR or LibWine to run on Linux.

Currently there is no such setup, so someone would need to make one. Hopefully this might change soon.

As of running against or in a full Wine environment, I think that is seriously overkill and will result in too much bloat to be worth making a very small number of additional programs work.

Answer 3

Yes, it is possible using NoesisGUI a real-time multi-platform XAML implementation. There are a few games already released using this technology in Linux, like VoidExpanse

Disclosure: I am one of the developers of this product.

Answer 4

If you check Known bugs of this link(also includes steps needed to install .NET onto Ubuntu)or this you may find that some(may be buggy) version of WPF works on Wine as for now. I did not find any definite test done as for now, but worth to try to run WPF "Hello world".

UPDATE2:

I have run latest IlSpy on latest Wine for Ubuntu 16.04. With 32 bit version of dotnet45 and corefonts installed via winetricks with windows 7 compatibility.

For this time no crashes and all things work fine. Fonts look really good.

IlSpy is shown via WPF and for person who loves programming with .NET is essential tool - the decompiler.

I downloaded latest portable SharpDevelop(build using WPF) with no extra. It started. Failed to create WPF project. Created WinForms. After opening some cs files and evidencing some glitches, tried to type - and it crashed.

UPDATE

I followed steps and got latest ILSpy.exe running on Ubuntu 14.4.

Next items to note:

1. wine stated that dotnet40 is not supported by 64 configuration, changed to 32 bit

2. fonts are ugly, but readable

3. basic functional works fine - I can see decompiled code - which is good enough for some development, but View -> Search and View -> Options -> Display crash.

Conclusion:

WPF on Linux is possible. But need some way to tackle issues.

Answer 5

From the Olive home page:

Olive is unsupported, should be considered as experimental software, and since it implements a shifting API there are no guarantees of any kind about the stability of the API.

I doubt anyone would have used it in a real project.

Answer 6

I heard a podcast interviewing miguel de icaza (the mono lead) maybe a few weeks ago, so that would have been maybe mid-december 2008, and he said that they had no WPF support at all yet.