badcel / blazorwebview

A WebKitGtkSharp WebView for running Blazor Hybrid applications.

BlazorWebView

A WebKitGtkSharp WebView for running Blazor Hybrid applications on Linux without the need to compile a native library.

Blazor Hybrid apps allow one to create a Blazor desktop application that uses the local machine's .NET runtime (not Blazor WASM), has full access to local resources (not sandboxed), and does not require hosting through a web server (e.g. Blazor server). It is just like any other desktop application written in C#, but uses Blazor and web technologies to implement the user interface.

Why?

Microsoft has decided to not support Maui on Linux, so there is currently no way to create Blazor Hybrid apps on Linux using only C#.

GtkSharp's WebKit implementation is currently incomplete. I don't understand how GtkSharp's codegen works, and GtkSharp doesn't to seem to get much frequent attention from its developers. It'd probably be best to move GTKSharp's PR #274 along, but this project provides a working alternative and a proof of concept until then.

How?

BlazorWebView uses some of the same code as Steve Sanderson's WebWindow and leverages Microsoft's WebView infrastructure to get Blazor Hybrid working. However, it differs from WebWindow in that it doesn't require one to compile a native shared library in C++, instead utilizing P/Invoke to call into the native libraries. This has the benefit that, as long as the native libraries are installed on the Linux system, one only needs to use the dotnet CLI to build and run BlazorWebView.

Demonstration

git clone https://github.com/JinShil/BlazorWebView.git
cd BlazorWebView/BlazorWebKit.Test
dotnet run

Usage

See the project in BlazorWebKit.Test for an example illustrating how to create a Blazor Hybrid application using the BlazorWebView.

Status

This poject was tested on Windows Subsystem for Linux, Raspberry Pi Bullseye 64-bit, and Debian Bullseye 64-bit. In the BlazorWebKit.Test/.vscode directory the necessary configuration to build, deploy, and debug a Raspberry Pi from a Debian Bullseyse 64-bit workstation PC can be found.