Avalonia/readme.md

# Avalonia
[![Gitter](https://badges.gitter.im/Join Chat.svg)](https://gitter.im/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia?utm_campaign=pr-badge&utm_content=badge&utm_medium=badge&utm_source=badge)

[![Build status](https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/status/hubk3k0w9idyibfg/branch/master?svg=true)](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/branch/master)

A multi-platform .NET UI framework. It can run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS and Android.

![](docs/images/screen.png)

Desktop platforms:

<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=28&v=c_AB_XSILp0' target='_blank'>![](docs/images/avalonia-video.png)<a/>

Mobile platforms:

<a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ9-hnmUbBM' target='_blank'>![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NJ9-hnmUbBM/hqdefault.jpg)<a/>

## NuGet

Avalonia is delivered as a NuGet package.
You can find the packages here: ([stable(ish)](https://www.nuget.org/packages/Avalonia/), [nightly](https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/wiki/Using-nightly-build-feed))

You can install the package like this:
`Install-Package Avalonia -Pre`

## Background

Avalonia is a multi-platform windowing toolkit - somewhat like WPF - that is intended to be multi-
platform. It supports XAML, lookless controls and a flexible styling system, and runs on Windows
using Direct2D and other operating systems using Gtk & Cairo.

## Current Status

Avalonia is now in alpha. What does "alpha" mean? Well, it means that it's now at a stage where you
can have a play and hopefully create simple applications. There's now a [Visual
Studio Extension](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a4542e8a-b56c-4295-8df1-7e220178b873)
containing project and item templates that will help you get started, and
there's an initial complement of controls. There's still a lot missing, and you
*will* find bugs, and the API *will* change, but this represents the first time
where we've made it somewhat easy to have a play and experiment with the
framework.

## Documentation

As mentioned above, Avalonia is still in alpha and as such there's not much documentation yet. You can
take a look at the [getting started page](docs/tutorial/gettingstarted.md) for an
overview of how to get started but probably the best thing to do for now is to already know a little bit
about WPF/Silverlight/UWP/XAML and ask questions in our [Gitter room](https://gitter.im/Avalonia/Avalonia).

There's also a high-level [architecture document](docs/spec/architecture.md) that is currently a little bit
out of date, and I've also started writing blog posts on Avalonia at http://grokys.github.io/.

Contributions are always welcome!

## Building and Using

See the [build instructions here](docs/guidelines/build.md)

## Contributing ##

Please read the [contribution guidelines](docs/guidelines/contributing.md) before submitting a pull request.