About Tizen .NET

What is Tizen .NET?

Tizen .NET is an exciting new way to develop applications for the Tizen operating system, which runs on 50 million Samsung devices, including TVs, wearables, mobile phones, and many other IoT devices around the world.

Existing Tizen frameworks are either C-based with no advantages of a managed runtime or HTML5-based with fewer features and lower performance than the C-based solution. With Tizen .NET, you can use the C# programming language, Common Language Infrastructure standards, and benefits from a managed runtime for faster application development and code execution that is efficient and secure.

To start developing Tizen applications using .NET, see Build your first app.

Tizen .NET Features and Components

Tizen .NET enables you to build .NET applications with NUI and Tizen .NET framework. NUI allows you to easily create a user interface, and TizenFX API provides numerous interfaces
to much of the hardware that is found in modern TV, mobile, wearable, and IoT devices. NUI (Natural User Interface) is a hardware accelerated C# toolkit which a set of predefined components and layouts for implementing GUI in both 2D and 3D modes. NUI is optimized for speed and low resource usage.

Tizen .NET consists of the following main components.

  • .NET Core

    .NET Core is an open-source, general-purpose development platform maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub. It is cross-platform (supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux) and can be used to build device, cloud, and IoT applications.

  • TizenFX API

    TizenFX API allows applications to call into platform-specific functionality from the shared code. This functionality enables .NET MAUI applications to do things a native application can do, without causing the portable part of the application to become littered with operating system-specific details.

    See About .NET Core to learn more about .NET Core, including its characteristics, supported languages and frameworks, and key APIs.

For multiplatform applications Tizen .NET provides .NET MAUI framework.

  • .NET MAUI

    .NET MAUI provides cross-platform APIs, which allow you to create user interfaces that can be shared across platforms. Visual Studio Tools for Tizen enable Tizen support for .NET MAUI.

  • Tizen.TV.UIControls

    Tizen.TV.UIControls provides Tizen TV-specific user interfaces. It is a set of extension APIs of .NET MAUI. Tizen.TV.UIControls APIs are supported only on Tizen TV devices with Tizen .NET support, unlike .NET MAUI which supports cross platforms.

    TizenFX supports C# APIs, which expose Tizen-specific features such as Tizen application framework, account management, location services, media services, and connectivity.

Major GitHub projects

Tizen is a Linux-based open-source platform. Most of the Tizen .NET-related projects have been developed on the public GitHub.

Official developer training and guides

Visual Studio Tools for Tizen

Visual Studio Tools for Tizen provides Tizen-specific tools to improve your productivity.

You can create a Tizen .NET application project with Project Wizard tool in Visual Studio Tools for Tizen. When you create a new project with a specific template, Project Wizard uses it to automatically create basic functionalities, and default project files and folders for the application.

Visual Studio Tools for Tizen extension is registered in Visual Studio Marketplace. You can install the extension from Visual Studio Marketplace in the Visual Studio IDE.

For more information, see the installation guide guides.