Avalonia requires at least Visual Studio 2022 and dotnet 7-rc2 SDK 7.0.100-rc.2 to build on all platforms.
git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
cd Avalonia
git submodule update --init
Go to https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/visual-studio-sdks and install the latest version of the .NET Core SDK compatible with Avalonia UI. Make sure to download the SDK (not just the "runtime") package. The version compatible is indicated within the global.json file. Note that Avalonia UI does not always use the latest version and is hardcoded to use the last version known to be compatible (SDK releases may break the builds from time-to-time).
.NET SDK requires developers to install workloads for each platform they are targeting. Since Avalonia targets pretty much every supported .NET platform, you need to install these workloads as well. Running it from the command line:
dotnet workload install android ios wasm-tools wasm-experimental
macOS workloads are not required to build Avalonia. Note: on Unix OS you need to run this command from sudo.
cd samples\ControlCatalog.NetCore
dotnet restore
dotnet run
If you want to open Avalonia in Visual Studio you have two options:
- Avalonia.sln: This contains the whole of Avalonia in including desktop, mobile and web. You must have a number of dotnet workloads installed in order to build everything in this solution
- Avalonia.Desktop.slnf: This solution filter opens only the parts of Avalonia required to run on desktop. This requires no extra workloads to be installed.
Avalonia requires Visual Studio 2022 or newer. The free Visual Studio Community edition works fine.
Build and run ControlCatalog.NetCore
project to see the sample application.
-
Error CS0006: Avalonia.DesktopRuntime.dll could not be found
It is common for the first build to fail with the errors below (also discussed in #4257).
>CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file 'C:\...\Avalonia\src\Avalonia.DesktopRuntime\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\Avalonia.DesktopRuntime.dll' could not be found >CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file 'C:\...\Avalonia\packages\Avalonia\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\Avalonia.dll' could not be found
To correct this, right click on the
Avalonia.DesktopRuntime
project then pressBuild
to build the project manually. Afterwards the solution should build normally and the ControlCatalog can be run. -
Error MSB4062 GenerateAvaloniaResourcesTask
Same as previous one, you need to manually build
Avalonia.Build.Tasks
project at least once.Alternatively, you can build the solution once with Nuke.
Install Nuke
dotnet tool install --global Nuke.GlobalTool --version 6.2.1
Build project:
nuke --target Compile --configuration Release
And run tests:
nuke --target RunTests --configuration Release
Or if you need to create nuget packages as well (it will compile and run tests automatically):
nuke --target Package --configuration Release
It's not possible to build the whole project on Linux/macOS. You can only build the subset targeting .NET Standard and .NET Core (which is, however, sufficient to get UI working on Linux/macOS). If you want to something that involves changing platform-specific APIs you'll need a Windows machine.
MonoDevelop, Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio for Mac aren't capable of properly opening our solution. You can use Rider (at least 2017.2 EAP) or VSCode instead. They will fail to load most of platform specific projects, but you don't need them to run on .NET Core.
Go to https://www.microsoft.com/net/core and follow the instructions for your OS. Make sure to download the SDK (not just the "runtime") package.
The build process needs Xcode to build the native library. Following the install instructions at the Xcode website to properly install.
git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
cd Avalonia
git submodule update --init --recursive
On macOS it is necessary to build and manually install the respective native libraries using Xcode. Execute the build script in the root project with the CompileNative
task. It will build the headers, build the libraries, and place them in the appropriate place to allow .NET to find them at compilation and run time.
./build.sh CompileNative
cd samples/ControlCatalog.NetCore
dotnet restore
dotnet run