Storage-Standby

Succeeded in porting (?) the Vite frontend to Wpf WebView2! I’m just happy it works now. There was an issue with the Configuration Manager/build setup, where WebView2 turned out to be incompatible with the Any CPU build, and so I had to convert the solution to an x64 platform build, which works out since that’s what I intended to do in the first place.

I’ve finished the skeleton and main UI features of my frontend Vite app (unfortunately took longer than expected). Nothing actually works cause it’s just a frontend for now. I’ll be implementing the backend next and the WebView2 functionality, before establishing communication between the frontend and backend via Windows pipes.

I’m in the middle of transitioning from a Winforms + Windows Service backend architecture to a decoupled C# ASP.NET Web Service + React Vite frontend with WebView2.

For those who didn’t know (like me), WebView2 allows developers to embed web content (HTML/CSS/JS) directly into native Windows apps. Of course, I could’ve used Electron, but WebView2 is widely seen as more performant as it uses the Chromium runtime already built into Windows, as opposed to Electron which bundles a separate instance of Chromium and Node.js into every app, resulting in a large footprint.

I’ve redone the UI in Vite and setup the basic ASP.NET endpoints using pipes. The next steps would be to finalize a functional UI and create the WPF project that would host the WebView capabilities.

Setup a basic UI in Winforms, which took longer than I thought. Unforunately, at the time I started this project, I didn’t know about the possibilities of a ASP.NET + React setup. I wanted to avoid Electron due to the heavy resource consumption, but since the possibility of using WebView2 exists for me now, I might transition to that soon.
I just don’t mesh very well with Winforms…