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.