This is a sample exploring how a Blazor could be used to build a cross-platform desktop application.
It's a Blazor UI inside an Electron shell, with the .NET part running natively on CoreCLR (not on WebAssembly).
The benefits of running on CoreCLR instead of on Mono WebAssembly are:
- Faster code execution speed
- Full debugger support
- Works with all .NET Core packages (because it's literally a standard .NET Core console application)
- Access to all OS APIs available to desktop applications, e.g., file I/O
- First make sure you can create and run regular browser-based Blazor apps by installing the usual Blazor prerequisites. Test and be sure you can create and run a Blazor app.
- Clone this repo, then build and run the project it contains
This repo is purely a short-term spike to help us understand how such a hosting model would be implemented and how it would be likely to perform.
The code in this repo is not maintained. If you wish to post any issues to let us know how you've got on with it, please feel free to do so. But please don't expect any issues to be fixed, nor any support questions to be answered.
Likewise, I won't be updating any code here to match newer versions of Blazor. It's a one-time spike only.
Summary: This is just a demo. Don't build real apps on top of this. But if you would be interested in building real Blazor+Electron apps, tell us about your scenarios.
For convenience, the packages directory contains prebuilt NuGet packages that support this sample. Sources for those packages are at http://github.com/SteveSandersonMS/BlazorElectronExperiment.Packages