I am a C#/.NET developer from Bucharest, Romania. I use Avalonia every day and I am building Cerneala because I want the useful retained instincts of WPF without carrying its diseased markup syntax and accumulated desktop ceremony forever.
This is context, not an excuse to treat people badly. If my wording lands harder than intended, direct feedback is welcome. I would rather clarify the intent than perform fake diplomacy while everybody guesses what I meant.
This was formerly described as Asperger's. In my case, the diplomatic layer can be missing from my vocabulary. Sometimes I am too direct, and sometimes that directness can sound offensive even when offending somebody was not my intention.
I usually mean the literal technical point underneath the wording. If the tone is sharp, ask what I mean. If I crossed a line, tell me plainly.
The language may be colorful. The useful part is usually the concrete technical claim directly underneath it.
If something sounds harsher than expected, ask whether that was the intended meaning. Often it was not.
You do not need diplomatic theater. Clear disagreement with evidence is considerably more useful.
Some developers rotate cuisines, beverages, frameworks, and operating philosophies. I have chosen a more deterministic execution path.
public sealed record DailyDefaults
{
public string Home { get; } = "Bucharest, Romania";
public string Work { get; } = "C# / .NET";
public string DailyUi { get; } = "Avalonia";
public string Food { get; } = "Chicken + mashed potatoes";
public string[] Drinks { get; } =
[
"Peach FuzeTea",
"Coca-Cola"
];
}Every day. Stable inputs, stable output, no unnecessary culinary abstraction.
Two supported backends. Both considered production-ready.
Where Cerneala is designed, argued with, tested, and occasionally sworn at.
I know the WPF family from daily use, not from nostalgic screenshots. Avalonia improves portability and modern deployment, but it inherited too much of WPF's markup language and mental ceremony.
Strong typing, excellent tooling, serious runtime performance, mature libraries, and a language that can support both application UI and game-facing framework architecture.
It is part of my daily professional work. That familiarity is exactly why I can see both what it does well and which inherited WPF decisions I do not want Cerneala to repeat.
A modern retained UI framework intended to become a strong alternative to WPF and Avalonia, especially where explicit frame ownership and game-loop integration matter.
WPF contains excellent ideas buried under aging assumptions and a markup syntax that became the default simply because everybody learned to tolerate it. Avalonia escaped the Windows-only runtime, then let too much of that syntax infect its own developer experience.
.crn, not general XAML compatibilityCerneala supports code-first UI and a constrained, source-generated .crn path. The point is not to ban declarative authoring. The point is to stop pretending the entire WPF XAML language must be preserved forever.
Familiar enough that experienced desktop UI developers recognize the useful mental models. Modern enough that a MonoGame developer does not have to surrender the frame, rendering pipeline, or sanity to use them.