Blazor Hybrid app via BlazorwWebView in Avalonia

[qrzychu]

It would be extremely good to be able to write Avalonia Blazor Hybrid aps, just like it is possible with MAUI, WPF and even Winforms

*What is Hybrid app? *

Ms Docs

In general, it is a native app with a specialized web view to handle Blazor. Blazor components are run directly in process (no WASM, no JS), and the view just renders them. I don't know any technical details how to do it.

That way you get great performance (in process Blazor components), low memory usage (the only web layer is rendering), Blazor productivty and cross-platform support due to Avalonia.

I have no idea if this is hard task, but I think many people would prefer to host the Hybrid Blazor app in Avalonia over .NET MAUI if they go cross-platform.

[maxkatz6]

Yes, it's possible to implement. Furthermore, it should already work with no issues on Windows, where you can combine our NativeControlHost with WPF/WinForms BlazorWebView component. Similarly how I did it for the usual WebView component in Avalonia using native browser view - https://github.com/maxkatz6/AvaloniaWebView.

It's definitely possible to port other platforms in similar way, like they did for MAUI dotnet/maui#654. Especially when Avalonia now supports native controls for mobile platforms in nightly builds, so it's possible to use native webkit for both android and ios.

Saying that, it's should be an interesting project, but it can't fit in the scope of our current release. And I am not sure if it's something that should be available as first class control in the Avalonia repository. Saying that, if community wants to implement that and maintain as an third party library, we can help with information how it should be implemented.

[jpmikkers]

Waiting for a decent x-platform open source c# WebView. Last time I tried CefGlue I couldn't get it to run in-process.

[jairbubbles]

@jpmikkers What about https://github.com/webview/webview_csharp?

[mondermurshed]

@jpmikkers
Hey, what is the status of the library?
I was looking to build the UI using Blazor inside Avalonia shell, so is the project done yet for production purposes?

My main goal is to build for Windows, MacOS and Linux, looking forward for your answer.

[jpmikkers]

@mondermurshed my project is still windows only unfortunately. I'm keeping an eye on photino.net for cross platform Blazor hybrid projects.

[mondermurshed]

All the support for you for trying to provide what the Avalonia team didn't for years.

For now i will just use WPF shell for my Blazor app, it seems the most logical decision at the moment.

[robloo]

Note that a lot of this work is just implementing a WebView for Avalonia that works cross platform. This is definitely something Avalonia needs as a 1st party control in some form to stay competitive. I'm surprised there hasn't been more concern that it is missing.

This means I don't necessarily agree that BlazorWebView shouldn't be a "first class control in Avalonia". WebView must be a first class control sooner rather than later. Then once that is done, making a BlazorWebView is quite easy I imagine.

When I have time I will be happy to assist in starting a WebView control (@maxkatz6 already did quite some work). It is something that will be needed on my end as well. For mobile platforms it must wrap the native WebViews so we might as well do the same for Desktop. This means it will be much easier to maintain as we don't have to worry about all the details or keeping it up to the latest standards. This will likely be the only control that follows a MAUI-type architecture though.

[Laftek]

Completely agree. Blazor becoming respected in webdev world can only help Avalonia to get bigger audience and possible replacement for MAUI.

[anna-dolbina]

If you're interested in proprietary solutions, you can try DotNetBrowser, which actually provides a complete web view for Windows, Linux, and macOS:
https://avaloniaui.net/Blog/dotnetbrowser-meets-avalonia

It will work with Blazor too, btw, after certain integration efforts.

[vlad-lubenskyi]

We created a template for Blazor Hybrid & Avalonia UI apps, using DotNetBrowser as a web view:

dotnet new install DotNetBrowser.Templates
dotnet new dotnetbrowser.blazor.avalonia.app -o Blazor.AvaloniaUi -li <your_license_key>
dotnet run --project Blazor.AvaloniaUi

DotNetBrowser is not free, of course. But here is an article that explains how we integrated it all together, and replicating the approach with with anything CEF-based should be a no-brainer.

[AndrewPlakhotnyi]

12к$ per year for a control. Nice open source project :)

[trashhacker]

your could do it for windows with that #17185 or https://github.com/MicroSugarDeveloperOrg/Avalonia.WebView
and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/components/render-components-outside-of-aspnetcore?view=aspnetcore-8.0

[AndrewPlakhotnyi]

This project is based on Xamarin.Mac, which reached end of support on May 1, 2024: dotnet/maui#21214

[sakib1361]

What happened to micro MicroSugarDeveloperOrg/Avalonia.WebView
https://github.com/MicroSugarDeveloperOrg/Avalonia.WebView?

Seems it got removed and there is no alternative. it worked mostly ok for windows and mac.

[HenKun]

This topic seems to be quite interesting and valuable. Is there any progress on that in 2025?

[MikeCodesDotNET]

More than three years and they still didn’t listen to the community.

Max explained three years ago that this is not on our roadmap and encouraged the community to build a solution instead. Our roadmap already represents multiple years of engineering effort, and we think very carefully about what should be a first party feature and what is better owned as a community project.

He said:

if community wants to implement that and maintain as an third party library, we can help with information how it should be implemented.

Listening to the community does not always mean saying yes to every request. In the three years since, nobody has stepped up to design, implement and maintain a Blazor Hybrid integration, and we have not received a single PR adding it to core. That is usually a strong signal that interest is limited compared to everything else we are working on.

We are happy to support serious community efforts in this area with guidance and review, but we are not going to throw out a carefully planned roadmap and long term vision in order to chase whichever request happens to be shouted about the loudest.

[mondermurshed]

@MikeCodesDotNET understand and respect that Avalonia has a long-term roadmap and limited engineering resources, and I appreciate the transparency behind that.
However, I believe a Blazor Hybrid integration could bring significant value to the Avalonia ecosystem.

There is a large number of developers currently using Blazor Hybrid with .NET MAUI, and many of them would be very interested in trying Avalonia if first-party support, or even officially endorsed guidance, were available. This could meaningfully increase Avalonia’s adoption, especially among web-focused .NET developers who want a cross-platform desktop solution without committing to MAUI.

I also don’t fully agree that there has been little interest. Many developers assume that if something is not on the official roadmap, it’s not worth requesting or expecting, so they never push further. A clearer signal from the Avalonia team that community contributions in this area are encouraged might help.

In any case, I appreciate your openness to reviewing serious community efforts. Even an official design document, starting point, or minimal guidance from the team could help motivate contributors to step in and build the integration.

[icavalheiro]

Recently avalonia team posted on their blog about bringing maui to web and linux, I wonder how they would do that without support maui blazor hybrid, that would require avalonia to opensource their webview... Its clear that microsoft is trying to push blazor hybrid as a first class citizen on its maui platform, so i wonder what will happen when that linux layer comes out next year (or would that also be a payed feature just like the avalonia wpf thing?)

[tanshanli]

This topic seems to be quite interesting and valuable. Is there any progress on that in 2025?

My current app is built with MAUI Blazor Hybrid. I was originally planning to migrate to the Avalonia platform because of its support for Linux and the web, but the need isn't strong enough at the moment. Moreover, I found that the official Avalonia team hasn't provided Blazor integration, so I've decided against making the switch.

[cyberdarius]

We do the same for many LOB applications:

We have a blazor UI library that contains 90% of the app (UI.MyApp)

and we incapsulate it in the required host:

MyApp.MAUI -> Android, iOS
MyApp.WinDesktop -> WPF AddWpfBlazorWebView
MyApp.MacLinuxDesktop -> Photino.Blazor

MyApp.WebApp -> BlazorWebApp Template
MyApp.PWA -> FULL BlazorWASM

Electron/Tauri is a no go for desktop and mobile: we don't want to include complete browser.

ATM we must rely on MAUI, Photino and WPF but now with the official opensource WebView, an AvaloniaBlazorWebView on top of that would be great.

[jairbubbles]

Avalonia announced recently that their webview is going open source which is good news for this topic! 🥳 (See https://avaloniaui.net/blog/the-avalonia-webview-is-going-open-source/)

Based on https://github.com/tryphotino/photino.Blazor I was able to have Blazor Hybrid content inside an Avalonia application.

It would need some adaptation to make it work on all platforms as it's using WebView2 only on Windows. (https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/app-development/embedding-web-content#platform-prerequisites)

It's highly experimental but I'm sharing the code in case it can be useful to many more people:
Avalonia.Blazor.zip

I'm also trying to use https://github.com/wieslawsoltes/NativeWebVIew but didn't have time to work more on this. @wieslawsoltes I don't know if you have interest for this but having support for Blazor Hybrid could maybe be part of your repository?

[Denny09310]

I’ve built something similar, inspired by Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebView.Wpf. Here’s the repository, including a sample project, in case anyone wants to extend it into a fully cross-platform solution. At the moment, I can confirm it works on Windows since it’s based on the WPF source code.

AvaloniaApplication1.zip