A few days ago, Microsoft published a blog post titled “.NET Core 3 and Support for Windows Desktop Applications“. Just by reading the title, I’m pretty sure many of us jumped in their seats as thoughts like “WPF on Linux” became a source of excitement.

Unfortunately however, the excitement turns into a disappointed “Oh. [Awkward silence] OK.” when reading that although .NET Core 3 is planned to support desktop applications built on technologies like Windows Forms and WPF, this support is for Windows only:

“Support for Windows desktop will be added as a set of “Windows Desktop Packs”, which will only work on Windows. .NET Core isn’t changing architecturally with this new version. We’ll continue to offer a great cross-platform product, focused on the cloud. We have lots of improvements planned for those scenarios that we’ll share later.”

The article does mention that this will bring several benefits ranging from performance improvements to deployment options, but this pales in comparison to the prospect of going cross-platform.

But given that they “are planning on releasing a first preview of .NET Core 3 later this year and the final version in 2019”, I can only wonder why they would spend a year doing a huge amount of work that most people won’t even care about, and pass it as a major release of .NET Core.

Time will tell, but one can get an idea of how people feel about this from the comments in the blog post.

My guess is that this could be part of a long-term strategy to retire the full .NET Framework, rather than bringing any real value to .NET Core or desktop applications.