Support for MacOS: Possible to decouple WinForms UI-dependency?

[josteink]

When developing cross-platform GUI applications with frameworks like Microsoft MAUI or Avalonia UI, you can publish your apps and run them on MacOS, Linux, smart-fridges or whatever.

However right now it seems like AutoUpdater.NET relies on WinForms to show update-dialogs, which means you can't use AutoUpdater.NET for any of those platform targets.

Would it be possible to reuse some of the core in AutoUpdater.NET, but make it possible to wire up your own UIs to improve cross-platform support and support for other UI libraries?

[ravibpatel]

It is possible but requires some work. In the future, I may create a decoupled solution that can be used across other UI frameworks.

[ktwrd]

@josteink You could use different libraries per platform.

AutoUpdater.NET for Windows, Sparkle for macOS, and depend on something like Flatpak, Snap, or telling the users to go to a wiki page so different options can be presented depending on the users Linux Distribution or personal preferences.

Hell, a minimal UI framework like FLTK could be used for AutoUpdater.NET (as an option and/or seperate nuget package) but that would be a bit of a pain.

If Avalonia UI or MAUI support was added, then the logic for the registry would have to be decoupled from the project since macOS and Linux don't have the Windows Registry available, and then you'd have to deal with the headache which can be finding somewhere to store the AutoUpdater.NET Config