How to use .Net Native in WinForm and C# (Visual Studio 2015)?

Question

I've just downloaded Visual Studio Community 2015 and I want to configure the .Net Native in my WinForm & C# Project, how do I do that?

Auxiliaries

Getting Started with .NET Native – Citrin

It doesn't sove the problem @SteffenWinkler – Auxiliaries

I'm pretty sure it does. If you read the article, you'll see that the article says that only Windows Store Apps are supported. Also I posted it as a comment because I'm not familiar with .NET Native. Quote from the article: Create a new project by using the Windows Store template for Visual C# or Visual Basic, or open an existing Windows Store app project – Citrin

If you want to leverage new technology, you must leave old technology behind. winforms is legacy technology and is not recommended for any new projects. .Net Native only works for modern windows apps (UWP). – Illsuited

Answer 1

.Net Native team member here. Steffen is correct that the 2015 releases of .Net Native are only designed to support UWP development. One problematic thing about older tech like WPF and WinForms is that they don't fit onto the API surface are of .Net Core which is the set of APIs we're running with for our new stacks.

We'll continue to look for new places to have ahead of time compilation available but it's mostly determined by need and by resourcing on our end (only so many dev hours in a day!). In particular, UWP applications need to run great on low end tablets and phones so not having to run a code generator on those devices is a huge win. HTH.

Remediable

Does the rule about "no Windows forms" still apply in 2020? I mean .NET Core was given Windows Forms support. And if I got you right, that was the main hinderance? – Deploy

I don't think there's plans to add support in .NET Native for Winforms (it has special knowledge about the XAML stack etc for UWP). The current work to support Core+WinForms based applications is being done under the ".NET 5" branding. Here's the "Preview 4" release notes that mention some things related to that work. devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/… – Remediable