Cross platform and more XAML variants

[lextm]

As you hinted in the v2 roadmap post, porting this tool to macOS/Linux via Uno is likely an interesting way to expand its impact on the developer community, and release its full potential to support other XAML variants.

I had some initial tests:

• Microsoft.Toolkit.Future almost works instantly
• XamlStudio.Toolkit has some challenges on Monaca.Editor as you outlined

In the following days I might go further on the adventure and see how far we can get with it.

Writing it here doesn't mean to hijack your agenda. The items you listed on v2 roadmap are useful and can take a lot of your time.

The goal on my side is to reuse as much as this repo offers and keep the cross-platform port always in sync. Then soon, some contribution might go back to here.

[michael-hawker]

Yeah, most of it is just legacy around how old the app is compared to much else. My plan has been to start fresh after a v2 to take the components and rebuild v3 in a way that would better support Uno, or at least Uno WASM.

I did mean to outline more of the project structure in the repo. Microsoft.Toolkit.Future were just general helpers that I figured would end up in the Windows Community Toolkit (before they changed to the CommunityToolkit. root, as this project is that old). And XamlStudio.Toolkit is meant to be core pieces that are helpers and could potentially be useful for building similar tools or enabling better dynamic XAML support in other apps.

The Editor control is the big challenge for cross-plat outside of trying to continue to use Monaco within a WebView, but as mentioned in the Roadmap the goal is to at least try and move to a more native solution.

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The main goal is always to focus on WinUI-based XAML, diverging to support ones beyond that does add complexity. There definitely needs to be some clean-up of the layers between what is related to the app vs. the application logic vs. the systems to support the various tools. It'd definitely do some things differently today starting over.

I'm sure there's some small QoL code pieces (like partial classes) that would make things easier, so feel free to open a PR to change any of those. I know Uno is mostly focused on WinUI 3 at the moment, so it may get easier too once we can get to dual-compiling XAML Studio here too for that with some global namespaces. That still needs the editor resolved first though.