How to no login to use Community

[Coloryr]

[maxkatz6]

You can skip login for now. But creating a free portal account will be necessary in the future.

[Coloryr]

Only use editer must need a portal account in the future?

[MikeCodesDotNET]

Only use editer must need a portal account in the future?

Yes. To use the new extension, you will require a valid license. This will be a requirement after April 2026.

[MikeCodesDotNET]

What if I refuse to create an account? Will I permanently be ineligible to use Avalonia?

Avalonia remains entirely free and open-source. The changes we've made only impact the Visual Studio extension tooling. If you don't want to create an account, you're free to:

• Use Rider
• Use Visual Studio Code
• Use any text editor + the CLI

[Miniontoby]

What if I refuse to create an account? Will I permanently be ineligible to use Avalonia?

Avalonia remains entirely free and open-source. The changes we've made only impact the Visual Studio extension tooling. If you don't want to create an account, you're free to:

* Use Rider

* Use Visual Studio Code

* Use any text editor + the CLI

Why would you make that change/decision?
The whole point of Visual Studio is developing for C#. I don't want to use Visual Studio Code as it doesnt integrate nicely and I aint going to work inside notepad on a 110 projects solution! Rider is also not capable.

And like: you guys still don't even have a visual designer with drag/drop elements from toolbox!
There's no reason for me to get an account. I'll just use the achived version with modifications I already had made.

[MikeCodesDotNET]

Why would you make that change/decision?

Because we've invested 6 figures into rebuilding the VS extension.

If you're using VS then you already have a Microsoft account. If you're posting on GitHub then you have a GitHub account. It's very, very common to require an account when a company is gifting you valuable things.

[Miniontoby]

If you're using VS then you already have a Microsoft account. If you're posting on GitHub then you have a GitHub account. It's very, very common to require an account when a company is gifting you valuable things.

I am using VS, but I do not use a Microsoft account, thats the amazing thing about VS. You can use it without account and you're not missing out on any features afaik!

Posting on Github of course is logical, but like thats because I've been using github for over 6 years or something with over 80 repositories. But its not like it was anonymously useable without account and without paying before hand!

Cause that's the case with Avalonia. It was anonymously usable without account, but now you're forcing us to use an account. And also going closed source on the extension...

But of course there's not stated anywhere in the TOS of Visual Studio, that you cannot make money of from extensions. Or that the source code of extension must be public. So I cannot stop you guys, even if I wanted.

---

Anyways, I've tried to create an account for Avalonia, but it says im ineligable for the free/community plan.

So we'd have to pay like €20/month (the €219/year) per seat (whatever per seat may mean) for us to just being able to code Avalonia inside our Visual Studio, with our little team of 3 developers, to make software for the 50-ish employees that we have.

That's just straight up insane. And we're only a non-profit organisation helping the blind and badsighted people by printing braille, letting volunteers record books into e-books and making feelable pictures and books! Like €219/year for a subscription is just insane!

We wanted to make the switch to Avalonia, since WinForms is just slow and rhoumers are that Microsoft will deprecate it one day.
Oh and since the stupid fact that Microsoft is:

• forcing the use of Windows 11
• removing the possibility for local accounts
• Windows updates sometimes are the cause for so many broken machines
  And a couple more factors.
  We're thinking about switching our 'kiosk' pc's to Linux/Ubuntu, because those pc's are the ones where we really don't want to need a Microsoft account for. Every Microsoft (work) account means higher bills... So yeah Avalonia being able to build for Linux is a win-win.

We've looked into using MAUI, but that framework is just straight up trash and doesn't allow sideloading of WinForms applications (which Avalonia is able to do).
and MAUI probably will get thrown into the trashbin by Microsoft some time in the future. It's not like they kept one of their 5+ different application frameworks in the last 20-ish years... And also MAUI doesn't support Linux.

So like Avalonia would be the way to go, but when keeping this in mind, I am not sure anymore.

[Nyaacinth]

Since Avalonia has switched to the closed source VS extension. What will happen to the VSCode extension (which relies on parts of the formerly open source VS extension to work, so it’s unlikely to get it working in the future)

[Sorrow-Scarlet]

Guess what, check your vs code extension...

[PhasonMatrix]

Avalonia team, if you want to make us go through this process, please at least test the user experience. I just signed up and found:

1. In the sign-up page, I clicked to reveal the two password fields to make sure they were the same. Got red error message with no text inside and the passwords didn't reveal until I clicked inside one. I did have a difference between the two passwords entered but the error message didn't say that, just blank.

2. After making an account for 'individual' I went back to Visual Studio and entered my user name and password and got a message saying I had no seats, so had to click "skip for now".

[MikeCodesDotNET]

Did you create a community license? Your account needs to have a valid license associated to it.

In the portal you'll need to complete the community eligibility wizard and agree to the license terms.

We'll look at how to make that more obvious.

[PhasonMatrix]

Hi Mike. I just tried to sign back in to create a community licence. Had to use 'password recovery'. I got an email but the link starts with http, not https.

http://email.avaloniaui.net/e/c/...

Browser blocked the page because https is not available, with error message:
"You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of email.avaloniaui.net is not available"