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Windows

Avalonia requires at least Visual Studio 2019 and .NET Core SDK 3.1 to build on Windows.

Clone the Avalonia repository

git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
git submodule update --init

Install the required version of the .NET Core SDK

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).

Open in Visual Studio

Open the Avalonia.sln solution in Visual Studio 2019 or newer. The free Visual Studio Community edition works fine. Build and run the Samples\ControlCatalog.Desktop or ControlCatalog.NetCore project to see the sample application.

Troubleshooting

  • 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 press Build to build the project manually. Afterwards the solution should build normally and the ControlCatalog can be run.

Linux/macOS

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.

Install the latest version of the .NET Core SDK

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.

Additional requirements for macOS

The build process needs Xcode to build the native library. Following the install instructions at the Xcode website to properly install.

Linux operating systems ship with their own respective package managers however we will use Homebrew to manage packages on macOS. To install follow the instructions here.

Install CastXML (pre Nov 2020)

Avalonia requires CastXML for XML processing during the build process. The easiest way to install this is via the operating system's package managers, such as below.

On macOS:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/8a004a91a7fcd3f6620d5b01b6541ff0a640ffba/Formula/castxml.rb

On Debian based Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc):

sudo apt install castxml

On Red Hat based Linux (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, etc) using yum (dnf takes same arguments though):

sudo yum install castxml

Clone the Avalonia repository

git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
cd Avalonia
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build native libraries (macOS only)

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

Build and Run Avalonia

cd samples/ControlCatalog.NetCore
dotnet restore
dotnet run