Chromely

Please read! -Upgrade to v5.2 - .NET 6, AspNetCore Owin, MVC-styled controller actions

For developers who are interested in WebView2 there is EdgeSharp, an offshoot of Chromely.

Chromely is a lightweight alternative to Electron.NET, Electron for .NET/.NET Core developers.

Chromely is a .NET/.NET Core HTML5 Chromium desktop framework. It is focused on building apps based on Xilium.CefGlue, CefSharp implementations of embedded Chromium (CEF) without WinForms or WPF, but can be extended to use WinForms or WPF. Chromely uses Windows, Linux and MacOS native GUI API as "thin" chromium hosts.

With Chromely you can build Single Page Application (SPA) HTML5 desktop apps with or without Node/npm. Building SPA apps using Blazor or javascript frameworks like Angular, React, Vue or similar is easy. You can use Visual Studio Code or any IDE you are familiar with as long as Chromely knows the entry html file from the compiled/bundled files. For more info please see - Blazor-Demos and Chromely-Apps.

Options of communicating (IPC) with rendering process are via:

Generic Message Routing - more info @ Generic Message Routing.
Ajax HTTP/XHR - more info @ Custom Scheme Handling.

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Have an app/project/tool using Chromely - please share!

Platforms

Cross-platform -Windows, Linux, MacOS. Built on CEF, CefGlue, NET Standard 2.0, .NET Core 3.0, .NET Framework 4.61 and above.

Windows⁽¹⁾ 32-bit
Windows⁽¹⁾ 64-bit
Linux⁽²⁾ 32-bit
Linux⁽²⁾ 64-bit
MacOSX⁽³⁾ 64-bit
Linux ARM⁽⁴⁾ Raspberry Pi

⁽¹⁾ Windows 7, Service Pack 1 and newer
⁽²⁾ Ubuntu 16.04 and newer
(Mono currently not working)
⁽³⁾ Tested on macOS Mojave 10.14.6 (Other versions will likely work too)
⁽⁴⁾ i.e. Raspberry Pi 3+ (starting with v5.x)
(for v4.x - manual download of CEF builds for ARM required, available on http://chromely.org/cefbuilds/index.html)

Creating a Simple App

For more info see - Getting Started or Wiki

A basic Chromely project requires:

ThreadApt.STA();

AppBuilder
    .Create(args)
    .UseApp<ChromelyBasicApp>()
    .Build()
    .Run();

Chromely Demos

Get started with our demos.

References

CEF - https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef
Xilium.CefGlue - https://gitlab.com/xiliumhq/chromiumembedded/cefglue
Chromium.AspNetCore.Bridge - https://github.com/amaitland/Chromium.AspNetCore.Bridge

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome, via PRs, issues raised, or any other means. To become a dedicated contributor, please contact the Chromely team or raise an issue mentioning your intent.