[Feature-request] Consider adding Blazor Hybrid support.

[ScarletKuro]

From your blog post, I understood that the goal is to grow the Avalonia ecosystem and encourage wider adoption. If that is the goal, this would be a logical next step.

Why such support would be in demand

There is currently no Linux support for Blazor Hybrid. As far as I know, the only project that provides this capability is Photino.Blazor

There have been related request in the past:
AvaloniaUI/Avalonia#16206
AvaloniaUI/Avalonia#8414

From what I understand, the main issue is that Linux lacks a standard native web view control.
However, there appear to be plans to introduce a CEF-based backend #7

Another problem that Avalonia could potentially address is that the current Blazor Hybrid implementation provided by Microsoft is not yet fully mature. For example:
dotnet/maui#34855
dotnet/maui#26746
dotnet/maui#7277
MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback#1078 etc

[martinstoeckli]

The NativeWebView of AvaloniaUI 12 is great news! I consider porting a blazor hybrid app to Avalonia to be able to support Linux, the only question left is, whether I should wait on Blazor support, or if I should rewrite the app to a Vue Js-Interop communication. Do you have a roadmap about Blazor support or any information whether this is planned?

[ScarletKuro]

There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that I was able to get it working using Avalonia and Avalonia.Controls.WebView directly.

But that’s where the good news ends.

First of all, these interfaces are internal:
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.Controls.WebView/tree/4e16564d5c0d1c6b4ccc0ab35f69be75fe673a2e/src/Avalonia.Controls.WebView.Core/Win/WebView2/Interop

Some of them are required for the WebViewManager. I copy pasted what I needed (there are easier ways that don't require copy-pasting, but they are not trimming/AOT-compatible at all). However, this makes the implementation essentially windows only, since those COM interfaces are specific to windows (which is fine for my use case for now).

Avalonia.Controls.WebView claims to be AOT-friendly (and from the code, it seems to be), so I tried to make my solution AOT-compatible as well.

That's where the real problems start. I tried publishing with PublishAot, and while the window appears and I can see the Blazor loading circle from index.html, nothing else happens. Then I tried using trimming without AOT, same problem.

This pretty much ruins the whole fuss for me. My dream is simply to have a small, self-contained app that runs Blazor Hybrid.

I'm not sure what’s wrong. There are no exceptions, nothing in the dev console (which still works after AOT/trimming), so I’m pretty stuck. Blazor is trimming-compatible, I'm a maintainer of MudBlazor, and we use trimming all the time, so I expected it to work at least with trimming. The only thing I can suspect is Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebView.

I'm also not sure if it’s worth open-sourcing this, since it would need proper battle testing and it's windows only. But since my plan didn’t work out, there’s no real reason for me to migrate from WPF Blazor Hybrid to Avalonia at this point.

[xlievo]

Your dream deserves to be respected !

[0use-TE]

Thank you very much for trying.
AvaloniaHybrid is also the framework I've always dreamed of.
@ScarletKuro