My Adventures Picking a UI Framework: Why I Chose Uno Platform

My Adventures Picking a UI Framework: Why I Chose Uno Platform

by | Mar 7, 2025 | Uncategorized

This year I decided to learn something new, specifically something UI-related. Usually, I only do back-end type of code. Most of my code has no UI representation, and as you might know, that’s why I love XAF from Developer Express so much—because I don’t have to write a UI. I only have to define the business model and the actions, and then I’m good to go.

But this time, I wanted to challenge myself, so I said, “OK, let’s learn something that is UI-related.” I’ve been using .NET for about 18 years already, so I wanted to branch out while still leveraging my existing knowledge.

I was trying to decide which technology to go with, so I checked with the people in my office (XARI). We have the .NET team, which is like 99% of the people, and then we have one React person and a couple of other developers using different frameworks. They suggested Flutter, and I thought, “Well, maybe.”

I checked the setup and tried to do it on my new Surface computer, but it just didn’t work. Even though Flutter looks fine, moving from .NET (which I’ve been writing since day one in 2002) to Dart is a big challenge. I mean, writing code in any case is a challenge, but I realized that Flutter was so far away from my current infrastructure and setup that I would likely learn it and then forget it because I wouldn’t use it regularly.

Then I thought about checking React, but it was kind of the same idea. I could go deep into this for like one month, and then I would totally forget it because I wouldn’t update the tooling, and so on.

So I decided to take another look at Uno Platform. We’ve used Uno Platform in the office before, and I love this multi-platform development approach. The only problem I had at that time was that the tooling wasn’t quite there yet. Sometimes it would compile, sometimes you’d get a lot of errors, and the static analysis would throw a lot of errors too. It was kind of hard—you’d spend a lot of time setting up your environment, and compilation was kind of slow.

But when I decided to take a look again recently, I remembered that about a year ago they released new project templates and platform extensions that help with the setup of your environment. So I tried it, and it worked well! I have two clean setups right now: my new Surface computer that I reset maybe three weeks ago, and my old MSI computer with 64 gigabytes of RAM. These gave me good places to test.

I decided to go to the Uno Platform page and follow the “Getting Started” guide. The first thing you need to do is use some commands to install a tool that checks your setup to see if you have all the necessary workloads. That was super simple. Then you have to add the extension to Visual Studio—I’m using Visual Studio in this case just to add the project templates. You can do this in Rider or Visual Studio Code as well, but the traditional Visual Studio is my tool of preference.

 

Uno Platform – Visual Studio Marketplace

 

Setup your environment with uno check

 

After completing all the setup, you get a menu with a lot of choices, but they give you a set of recommended options that follow best practices. That’s really nice because you don’t have to think too much about it. After that, I created a few projects. The first time I compiled them, it took a little bit, but then it was just like magic—they compiled extremely fast!

You have all these choices to run your app on: WebAssembly, Windows UI, Android, and iOS, and it works perfectly. I fell in love again, especially because the tooling is actually really solid right now. You don’t have to struggle to make it work.

Since then, I’ve been checking the examples and trying to write some code, and so far, so good. I guess my new choice for a UI framework will be Uno because it builds on my current knowledge of .NET and C#. I can take advantage of the tools I already have, and I don’t have to switch languages. I just need to learn a new paradigm.

I will write a series of articles about all my adventures with Uno Platform. I’ll share links about getting started, and after this, I’ll create some sample applications addressing the challenges that app developers face: how to implement navigation, how to register services, how to work with the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, and so on.

I would like to document every challenge I encounter, and I hope that you can join me in these Uno adventures!

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