WinUI 3.0 Alpha (February 2020) w/ WebView2 🚀👩‍💻🎉

[adambarlow]

WinUI 3.0 Alpha (February 2020) w/ WebView2

As mentioned in the recent community call we now have a WinUI 3.0 Alpha available w/ Chromium-based Microsoft Edge WebView2!

Please note that WinUI 3.0 Alpha is a very early prerelease and has lots of known issues and missing functionality, so it isn't ready for production apps. Future previews and the first stable version of WinUI 3 in 2020 will add support for everything outlined in the roadmap.

In particular if you don't see an API in the WebView2 API spec and it is existing functionality of the current WebView, it is likely planned to be included on the base WinRT object, whose API is likely to closely match the current ICoreWebView2 interface.

Feedback on WebView2 can be posted as comments to this issue or alternatively on the WebView2 proposal.

Installation info

For installation info and known issues see:

WinUI 3.0 Alpha (February 2020)

There's a super-short survey with the download link - we'd love to know more about how you're interested in using WinUI.

Please try out the Alpha, let us know what you think and open issues if you run into any bugs that aren't listed already!

What's next?

As outlined in the roadmap we're hard at work getting WinUI ready for open source development, plus working toward a more complete preview, .NET 5 support, and more!

[weitzhandler]

Are .NET Core 3, C#8 and there newer csproj type ready?

[mdtauk]

Is WebView2 the only change, is there a fuller changelog available somewhere?

What progress is there with Win32 runtime support with WinUI 3.0 XAML UI?

[adambarlow]

@mdtauk Good question.

The Feb 2020 alpha refresh includes all of the work since our last release in Nov. Although WebView2 is the biggest new feature, a number of other fixes have been made to increase stability and to prepare for open source. Progress was made on Win32 runtime support, however, it is not yet complete enough that we recommend additional self-hosting / exploring of this functionality at this point in time.

[mdtauk]

@mdtauk
The Feb 2020 alpha refresh includes all of the work since our last release in Nov. Although WebView2 is the biggest new feature, a number of other fixes have been made to increase stability and to prepare for open source. Progress was made on Win32 runtime support, however, it is not yet complete enough that we recommend additional self-hosting / exploring of this functionality at this point in time.

Thank you for the reply. Good to know things are happening. Once the thing has been open sourced, change logs will become the norm :)

[danzil]

@weitzhandler Support for .Net 5 and SDK-style projects is not yet ready. We're currently working on this as we speak.

[nabilahmed739]

@adambarlow with WebView2 can a Progressive Web App (PWA) be installed or rather can service worker registration?
The scenario is to run a PWA application inside a WebView2 in a WPF app. As you may guess, it is a enterprise LOB app.

Reasons for not wrapping it in a UWP could be:

• App needs to start and communicate with third party console apps or windows services (In UWP there is a restriction for such communication within the app package)
• Install app for at system level so all users can use (Plus avoid all the UWP sideloading and remote deployment overhead)
• Access device features like fielesystem without need for defining restricted capabilities, etc..

[vascofernandes]

I ma not able to run a WinUI3 UWP app with WebView2 v0.9.430.

The app just crashes.

'App2.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\xmllite.dll'. 
'App2.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Users\Vasco\source\repos\App2\App2\bin\x86\Debug\AppX\WebView2Loader.dll'. 
Exception thrown at 0x75EF3DB2 (KernelBase.dll) in App2.exe: WinRT originate error - 0x8007007F : 'The specified procedure could not be found.'.
'App2.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\userenv.dll'. 
'App2.exe' (Win32): Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\profext.dll'. 
Exception thrown at 0x75EF3DB2 in App2.exe: Microsoft C++ exception: winrt::hresult_error at memory location 0x0935D9E0.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Web.WebView2/0.9.430