Change to newer electron

[Jogai]

Seems easy to upgrade to ElectronSharp from ElectronNET to make use of newer dependencies. Would you be interested in that?

[SimonNyvall]

There was a PR introducing Tauri (#265), which brought a new Rust-based shell as an alternative to the Electron version. From my understanding, the project is maintaining two versions of the app for now: one using Electron and another using Tauri.

That said, I’m not sure what the long-term plans are for the Electron version or any upgrades, maybe @tareqimbasher has some insights for future plans?

[Jogai]

Thanks for the clarification. I was triggered because the arch aur distrubutes an electron version.

[SimonNyvall]

Yeah, the bin uploaded to the AUR is version 0.7.2 and only ships with the Electron shell. There is an AppImage available for download with the Tauri shell, but I have not tried it yet.

[tareqimbasher]

I think the plan is to continue maintaining the Electron version for a while, but the idea is to eventually phase it out in favor of the more lightweight Tauri one. There isn't a specific timeline; its really when the Tauri version is stable. I was thinking of moving to ElectronSharp due tot Electron.NET's lack of maintenance but now I'm not sure that effort is worth it, unless there is a real benefit (example: faster startup) from moving to a later Electron version.

@Jogai I don't maintain the AUR package so I'm not sure if electron23 should be a dependency to be able to run NetPad since its offering the pre-built binary, try taking it out of the PKGBUILD script and see if it will run without it. Or alternatively try removing just electron23 (if nothing else depends on it besides NetPad) and see if it runs.

[Jogai]

I'm not sure that effort is worth it, unless there is a real benefit

The effort required is really low imo, and the benefits would be at least to not include a dependency with a fair bit of vulnerabilities.
However those are only fixed in versions supported by recent electron sharp releases which require net8. Since net6 is still supported for another month I wonder if you would be willing to move to a net8 only version. If that's the case I can make a separate PR for just updating electron?

[tareqimbasher]

Ok I'm willing to move to ElectronSharp, a PR would be great. Before we do that I'd need to move the app to .NET 8 if that's the min requirement by ElectronSharp. I'll work on that first and update you here.

[Jogai]

I did both, see: #274

[tareqimbasher]

@Jogai thanks. after the .NET 8 upgrade you'll want to make sure that DB connections still work when selecting different .NET sdks from the drop-down