BlazorWebView for WinUI 3

[Pinox]

Description

Please enable BlazorWebView for WinUI 3. I currently have Blazor Views that I would like to use in a native WinUI 3 app and there is no easy way to do that.

What I find strange is that I understand BlazorWebView works in Winforms + WPF and not in WinUI3.

Public API Changes

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Intended Use-Case

Here is an example view of how I want to use it , this is part of the WinUI 3 Control galley app.

This is a code snippet in MAUI of the functionality:

I think it will also make native WinUI development more approachable and powerful where I can now sherry pick the best UI assets that exist in the market. ( from web , native controls or skia ) and my feeling is native development needs this as it is becoming more and more difficult to justify native WinUI3 development over PWA apps.

It will also significantly decrease the cost of native windows development.

I also raised this request in WinUI 3 template studio but I understand the feature should be raised in the maui repo here.

microsoft/TemplateStudio#4506

[javiercn]

@Pinox thanks for contacting us.

You can use Blazor Hybrid on WinUI via .NET MAUI (Maui Blazor).

[Pinox]

thanks @javiercn , but wouldn't that mean I cant use all the native WinUI 3 controls ? I now have to write MAUI XAML and add an extra layer of complexity between the native WinUI 3 controls.

[javiercn]

@Pinox I'm not sure if MAUI prevents using the native controls. I think there is a way but I'm a Blazor "expert". Let me check-in with the rest of the team and we'll update this issue once we've discussed it.

/cc: @danroth27

[danroth27]

While you can use .NET MAUI to target Windows using WinUI 3 there are still cases where you may want to use WinUI 3 directly and write a native Windows app without any .NET MAUI abstractions. For example, the Windows apps that ship with the Windows OS have no requirements to be cross-platform. We don't have any immediate plans to add a BlazorWebView for WinUI 3, but we can consider doing so based on user feedback.

[Pinox]

Just my general observation. MS touts WinUI 3 as the future for native desktop development that is using the Windows SDK. So the webview control was created to "modernize" your legacy native apps with web content. If there is no integration of Blazor into WinUI 3 then you are forcing everyone to migrate again to another stack. There is now no migration path forward for native apps that wants to tightly integrate web content within the same app and that wants to use c# doing so. (at least not an easy way)

To me this fragments the whole .NET ecosystem even further and I think that is a mistake. Surely the end goal should include the unification of the ecosystem and bringing everyone into the loop. This will make everyone stronger including Blazor and MAUI.

I'm sitting with a native app that I want to upgrade to WinUI3 as that is the recommended path forward for Windows development. In the process of doing this I would like to "modernize" this with web content where it make sense and immediate I am getting stuck and that is not cool.

Please seriously consider this as a priority.

[drasticactions]

Using Maui Embedding you can add a BlazorWebview to an existing WinUI3 app and integrate it with your existing WinUI3 app (or any other "native" platform app that MAUI targets, like iOS and Android). That should functionally do what you want.

Granted, this is also something we have no documentation for outside of what Clancy wrote for that PR, and if I didn't tell you that was a thing you could do, you would have never discovered it on your own.

[Pinox]

Thanks @drasticactions. Did not know about the embedding part. good to know.

With my limited understanding here, the maui controls do not expose the BlazorWebView only the normal webview control.

What we need is the BlazorWebView. When I look at the WPF implementation then that "BlazorWebView wrapper" seems to live in:
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebView.WindowsForms
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebView.Wpf

So what we need is a Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebView.WinUI component that do not currently exist. In Wpf this implementation is as simple as:

A good article about the BlazorWebView is:
https://www.codemag.com/Article/2111092/Blazor-Hybrid-Web-Apps-with-.NET-MAUI

We've moved this issue to the Future milestone. This means that it is not going to be worked on for the coming release. We will reassess the issue following the current release and consider this item at that time.

[Pinox]

I certainly hope that the Blazor Team gives WinUI3 some shine this year in .NET 8 planning.

What I would like to see is a:

Blazor WinUI 3 Native template
A project that creates a native WinUI3 app and uses BlazorWebView to add Blazor functionality to a native WinUI 3 app where native WinUI 3 controls can also be used.