While working on Zurfur and porting the GUI from WinForms to Avalonia, I got to thinking what it would be like to implement a GUI without using inheritance. I also wanted to see how big a minimal C# WebAssembly GUI would be. So far, the full download is only about 3.1 megabytes of compressed data.

You can see the result here: https://gosub.com/zurfurgui

This project is exploring MDV/MDCV as an alternative to MVVM.

The following docs cover the internals of this project:

• Architecture — MDV architecture, code generation, and system internals
• Initialization — Startup and initialization procedure for applications using ZurfurGui
• Property Binding — Property binding system
• Styles and Themes — Style and theme system (style sheets, selectors, pseudo-classes, and property resolution)
• ComboBox — ComboBox control: usage, generic item types, styling, and internals

Zurfur Gui is an experiment to see what a minimal C# WebAssembly Canvas GUI might look like:

• Runs in browsers and natively on Windows
• Quick and easy to whip up small GUI applications (tools, etc.)
• Uses JSON instead of XML — this is called ZUI JSON
• Small download — uses the built-in platform drawing API (i.e. Canvas)

Zurfur Gui uses a Model Data View (MDV) pattern. The view (V) declares the data it needs in the ZUI JSON .data section, and then build-time code generation via the ZurfurGuiGen source generator creates a strongly-typed data interface plus a concrete data class (D). The view consumes only the interface. You can use D directly (for example, deserialize JSON into it) or extend D as a partial class that maps to/from the domain model. This makes the view's data requirements explicit and keeps bindings compile-time checked.