Building native Windows apps from a Mac: Mole dev's C# + WinUI 3 playbook
dotey · x · 2026-10-21
HiTw93's second post on cross-platform tooling for Mole: how he develops a native Windows app from a Mac.
- Stack: C+ WinUI 3 on .NET 10 LTS; WinUI 3 ships independently via Windows App SDK so plain Win32 apps can use it, with native Fluent styling, high-DPI scaling and ARM64 support
- Packaging: runtime bundled so users don't install .NET; separate x64/ARM64 native installers (no emulation on Snapdragon laptops); open-source Velopack for incremental updates
- Code reuse: asked AI to analyze 100k+ lines of Swift from the Mac version — less than 20% is reusable without AppKit/SwiftUI, so the Windows side is mostly rewritten
- Includes a month's worth of pitfalls from building Mole for Windows
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