Avalonia requires at least Visual Studio 2017 to build on Windows.
For the moment under windows, you must have gtk-sharp installed. Note that after installing the package your machine may require a restart before GTK# is added to your path. We hope to remove or make this dependency optional at some point in the future.
git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
git submodule update --init
Open the Avalonia.sln solution in Visual Studio 2015 or newer. The free Visual Studio Community
edition works fine. Run the Samples\ControlCatalog.Desktop project to see the sample application.
To build Avalonia under Linux, you need to have a recent version of Mono installed. Mono is a cross- platform, open source .Net platform. There is a very good chance that the version of Mono that came with your Linux distribution is too old, so you want to install a more up-to-date version. The most convenient way to to this is through your package manager. The Mono project has great installation instructions for many popular Linux distros.
This will make the most up-to-date Mono release available through your package manager, and offer you updates as they become available.
Once you have your package manager configured for the Mono repository, install the mono-devel
package, for example on ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install mono-devel
Once installed, check the version of mono to ensure it's at least 4.4.2:
mono --version
git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
git submodule update --init
cd Avalonia
mkdir -p .nuget
wget -O .nuget/nuget.exe https://dist.nuget.org/win-x86-commandline/latest/nuget.exe
mono .nuget/nuget.exe restore Avalonia.sln
To build Avalonia in the Debug configuration:
xbuild /p:Platform=Mono /p:Configuration=Debug Avalonia.sln
You should now be able to run the ControlCatalog.Desktop sample:
mono ./samples/ControlCatalog.Desktop/bin/Debug/ControlCatalog.Desktop.exe
Unless you have a very current version of monodevelop (6.1.x or newer), it is necessary to manually
restore the Nuget depdendencies as mentioned above. You must then
disable MonoDevelop's inbuilt NuGet package manager add-in by going to Tools -> Add-in Manager or
it will complain that a newer version of NuGet is needed.
Finally, select the Debug | Mono or Release | Mono build configuration and you should be good to
go!