Avalonia started in December 2013 as one developer’s open-source project, and it grew because other developers picked it up. They filed issues and sent pull requests, answered each other’s questions, wrote libraries and themes, and shipped applications we’d never have imagined. The main repository has over 31,000 stars on GitHub as of October 2026, but plenty of what developers rely on every day lives outside it, in controls, tools and samples the community builds and maintains. We’re a team distributed in 11 countries, and the community shapes a lot of what we do. Your issues and discussions decide what we build next, and Hot Reload topped our user research for years before we shipped it in September 2026. We owe Avalonia to the people who use it, so the community is getting a day of its own: Avalonia Conf 2026, free and online on Wednesday 9 December. The call for papers is open until 19 November.
Why an open call for papers
We write about Avalonia all the time, in release notes, in the docs and in posts like this one. But the best lessons come from the teams running Avalonia in production: the architecture that held up years later, the rendering problem that took a week to track down, what moving a large WPF application to macOS and Linux actually took.
Those stories usually end up scattered across GitHub issues, recordings and the odd blog post, if they’re written down at all. Avalonia Conf puts them in one place. The people who did the work are the best ones to tell those stories, so the sessions come from an open call rather than from us. It’s a meeting point for the Avalonia ecosystem, including work from companies, community projects, practices and lessons, for anyone building with .NET.
The day: a keynote, eight sessions and a live Q&A
Avalonia Conf runs on Wednesday 9 December, starting at 09:00 CET (UTC+1). We’ll open with a 30-minute keynote, then hand the stage to eight community sessions of 45 minutes each, Q&A included, with five minutes between them. Five run in the morning and three in the afternoon, with an hour for lunch in between. After the last session, members of the Avalonia team join for a 30-minute live Q&A, so bring your questions. A short contest follows, and then we close the day.
The conference page shows when the day starts and ends in your own time zone, and the full schedule, with each session’s time, title and speaker, goes up there when the agenda is announced on 23 November. You can add the day to your calendar now.
The stream is free and open to everyone, so registration is optional. Register for free and we’ll email you when the agenda is out, send a reminder with the stream link, and let you know when the recordings are published. The link also goes up on the conference page before the day.
What we’re looking for
We want sessions built on real experience, for people who design, build or maintain applications with Avalonia. Any of these is a good place to start:
- Architecture: MVVM, composition, navigation, modularity and the patterns that held up in production.
- UI and product: Interface design, theming, accessibility and the details that make an app feel finished.
- Performance: Startup, rendering, memory and profiling, with the measurements to back it up.
- Cross-platform: Desktop, mobile and browser targets, packaging, deployment and CI/CD.
- Migration: Honest accounts of what moving from WPF, Windows Forms or other frameworks actually took.
- Ecosystem: Open-source libraries, tooling and practices that scale across teams.
AI has a place here too. We’d like to hear from teams adding LLM features to their apps, from chat interfaces and streaming responses to local models and semantic search, and about the UI work that makes those features usable. Talks on MCP servers that let agents work with an application, or an honest look at what coding agents can and can’t do when building and testing Avalonia apps, are welcome as well.
We care less about general introductions to AI than about what you built and what you learned.
What makes a strong proposal
The strongest proposals name a problem, the context it came up in, what you learned and the level the talk is pitched at. A specific story beats a broad survey:
- Strong: “Taking a 15-year-old WPF line-of-business app to macOS”
- Weak: “Migrating to Avalonia”
The first tells us far more about what the talk will cover.
Pitch it for 45 minutes. That’s long enough to show real code and real measurements, and short enough that the talk needs a clear point. Q&A is part of the 45 minutes, so leave room for questions. It’s online, so you present from wherever you are.
How to submit and timeline
- Open from Thursday 29 October. Send proposals through the Avalonia Conf 2026 call for papers on Koliseo.
- Closes at 09:00 CET on Thursday 19 November.
- Agenda announced on Monday 23 November. Once the call closes, we’ll select the sessions, contact the selected speakers and publish the full agenda on the conference page.
Speakers, attendees and organisers all follow the code of conduct, in the chat, in talks and on social media.
See you on 9 December
Submit a talk on Koliseo before 09:00 CET on 19 November, and keep an eye on the conference page for the agenda and the stream link. If you’d rather watch than speak, register for free and start collecting your questions for the Q&A with the team.
If you’ve learned something the hard way building with Avalonia, this is the place to share it.