A tiny .NET 6 Windows application that hosts web UI in WebView2. No UI frameworks, just a plain old Win32 message loop.
This is an experiment to see how far I can push a slim, minimal Windows application that uses C# for the hosting logic and web UI for the "front-end".
The native UI situation on Windows is a little bleak and WebView2 will be shipping with Windows 11, so it's a good time to lean into web UI a little more. But... the .NET team has been killing it in recent years, I'd like to write my code that lives outside Chromium in C# or F#.
Microsoft provides WinForms and WPF wrappers for WebView2, so I could just embed web UI in a plain old .NET GUI app. But WinForms and WPF are big dependencies and they're mostly unnecessary if web UI is my primary focus. Why not see how far we can get with an old-school Win32 message pump?
CsWin32 for generating bindings to native Windows APIs, and Microsoft.Web.WebView2.Core which handles COM interop with WebView2. That's it!
I hacked this together in a few evenings. This is probably broken in many subtle ways and you should not use it in production. But it works for me :)
Trimmed self-contained executables seem to fail - possibly related to this issue.
Initially derived from Vítězslav Imrýšek's handy CsWin32Playground repo, where he shows how to create an old-school message pump using CsWin32.