This seems like it would be a prime opportunity to introduce UWP applications to macOS and Linux. That would be a welcome alternative for developers looking to develop high quality native + cross platform applications.
.NET desperately needs a first-party supported solution for cross-platform desktop apps. I was searching this news for any hint of that, and don't think we're going to see it yet.
I am unsure if they would try to push UWP to those platforms, or focus more on expanding Xamarin which is already cross-platform. I know WinForms and WPF are considered far too dependent on Windows proprietary APIs to ever be officially supported elsewhere, I assume UWP is the same.
That looks pretty cool. I've also seen Avalonia, which is a more .NET-focused approach, meant to be very similar to WPF: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
But the main issue for me is that Microsoft just needs to pick something, and say "this is how to write cross-platform desktop apps in .NET", and support it. I don't really care what it is, they just need to have one.
I agree, but one of my concerns about Microsoft's direction is... that there doesn't seem to be a clear direction regarding UI frameworks. We now have Win32, Windows Forms, WPF, UWP XAML, and React Native, with no clear message about what platform makes sense to invest in for the long-term. In fact, I am starting to think that Microsoft may be abandoning the UWP XAML direction in favor of React Native since presumably React Native has a better cross-platform story than XAML does.
My guess is we aren't so lucky just yet. UWP has so much Windows 10 device specific functionality, and I think that Xamarin.Forms already satisfies this need.
Instead, what I see them doing is making it easy to share code between UWP and other platforms. There are so many competing options for code re-use, hopefully .NET 5 can consolidate things a bit without sunsetting Mono projects
