Avalonia 11 has been released with support for more platforms, automated testing, and Input Method Editor (IME) support for text input.

Avalonia started life as a cross platform .NET UI framework with XAML, data binding, and lookless controls. Avalonia's initial support for developing XAML-based applications for Windows, Mac and Linux has been widened to become an open source UI framework for building desktop, mobile, web and embedded applications using a .NET single codebase.

The first and most visible addition is new platform support for iOS, Android, and WebAssembly, with preview support for Apple's visionOS for Samsung's TizenOS. Another improvement is a Template Studio for Avalonia, a streamlined solution designed to accelerate the creation of new Avalonia apps using an intuitive, wizard-based UI.

This release also has a variety of other improvements. A new composition renderer is described as being a significant advancement in visual capability and performance. The renderer adds new animation options with support for implicit animations, connected animations and render thread animations. It also provides performance improvements, reduces memory requirements and enables high frame rates even on low-powered embedded devices.

The new version also has improved text rendering capabilities with support for inline elements, meaning developers can use a variety of looks within a single TextBlock, from changing font styles to adding hyperlinks, or even embedding controls. 

Input Method Editor (IME) support has also been added, meaning users can enter characters and symbols not found on their input devices. IME support also works with on-screen keyboards on mobile and web platforms, so that Avalonia apps now play nicely with features such as auto-completions and other OS provided text features.

Automated testing has been overhauled so it goes beyond the Avalonia test environment to include traditional testing frameworks like Appium. There's also a new 'Headless' mode that lets you run your entire application and execute tests on it at speed.

Avalonia 11 fully supports Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation and trimming, which eliminates unused code during the publishing process, dramatically reducing application sizes. The team says developers can now experience ~60% smaller application sizes, providing faster downloads, quicker startup times, and less end-user storage used.

Avalonia 11 is available now.

More Information

Avalonia Website

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