Welcome
Welcome to the documentation for Avalonia.
Overview
Avalonia is a powerful framework that enables developers to create cross-platform application using .NET. It uses its own rendering engine to draw UI controls, ensuring consistent appearance and behavior across various platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and WebAssembly. This means that developers can share their UI code and maintain a uniform look and feel regardless of the target platform.
Applications built with Avalonia are written in C# or F#, which makes it easy to rapidly prototype applications that can develop over time into complex systems. Unlike other toolkits that might be restricted by limited APIs, or poor performance, Avalonia applications have the advantage of full access to the platform's capabilities and deliver incredible performance, thanks to the compositional renderer.
As Avalonia applications are cross-platform applications, they are architected similarly to other traditional cross-platform applications. The most common approach is to create a core project that houses the shared code, and then develop platform-specific projects that will consume this shared code.
Avalonia offers two techniques to create user interfaces. The first one is to use code to build UI views leveraging the extensive API provided by Avalonia. Alternatively, developers can utilize the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), a declarative markup language that allows developers to define user interfaces. In this approach, the user interface structure is described in a XAML file, while the runtime behavior is defined in a separate code-behind file. To learn more about XAML, refer to Avalonia XAML.
Get Started
Get started right away even if you are completely new to Avalonia using a simple step-by-step tutorial, with introductions to the basic concepts behind the framework.
Get started here.
Continue Your Learning
Learn the basic concepts of Avalonia.
Get started here.
How-To Guides
Our guides offer practical implementation advice, often as step-by-step procedures. This section is organised by task.
Get the guides for practical advice here.
Advanced Concepts
Read this section to expand your knowledge of the concepts used by Avalonia. This section is organised by subject.
Explore the advanced Avalonia concepts here.
Coming from WPF?
We have specific guidance and some detailed reference material for developers who are converting applications from WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).
See our WPF migration guide here.
Avalonia XPF - Cross-Platform WPF
Take your WPF apps to macOS and Linux in minutes, not months.
Consult Our Reference
See our reference section here.
Getting Help
If you encounter any issues or bugs with Avalonia, please open a new issue on GitHub.
Access the Avalonia GitHub here.
We have an active developer community on Gitter and Telegram that can often help.
Connect to community support using the details here.
In addition to community support, we offer a range of commercial support plans that provide priority assistance from the core contributors.
To learn more about commercial support, see our website page here.