11 ms·

WasmWinforms – .NET WinForms in a browser

229 points by yread 8y ago

dvh 8y ago
ERROR> https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js(1181) https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono...: Uncaught RangeError: WebAssembly.Memory(): could not allocate memory
- amaccuish 8y ago
  I got RangeError: bad Memory initial size
  - adzm 8y ago
    Calculator demo uses around 1.5gb of memory so I wouldn't be surprised if it runs into various memory pressure issues.
    - dvh 8y ago
      That explains it as I have only 512MB.
      - leeman2016 8y ago
        Wow. Is that a VM or an actual PC?
        dvh 8y ago
        Mobile
      - yread 8y ago
        "The original WinForms ran on it so this new stuff should as well", right?
  - est31 8y ago
    I get that same error in Firefox, but in Chrome it works. Sigh.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  var TOTAL_MEMORY = Module["TOTAL_MEMORY"] || 1258291200; That is, if the module doesn’t specify how much memory it wants (and it doesn’t), then it asks for around 1.25 GB.
dvt 8y ago
Calculator example breaks when attempting to divide by zero: Uncaught abort(20) at Error at jsStackTrace (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:1063:12) at stackTrace (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:1077:11) at abort (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:18097:43) at nullFunc_ii (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:14694:2) at b20 (wasm-function[10723]:31) at emterpret (wasm-function[922]:12351) at _do_icall (wasm-function[8343]:63) at emterpret (wasm-function[922]:7917) at _interp_exec_method_full (wasm-function[7977]:65) at emterpret (wasm-function[922]:7129) Which is weird, because in the actual code[1], there's a division by zero check which should pop up a message box: case '/': if (opr2 != 0) { result = (opr1 / opr2).ToString(); } else { MessageBox.Show("Can't divide by zero"); } break; Given a closer look, I doubt this is a WasmWinforms bug, but rather mono-wasm (or somewhere else along the compilation pipeline). Edit: I'm wrong, it's a WasmWinforms bug. [1] https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Simple-Calculator-54ec8e4a https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Simple-Calcul...
- hokkos 8y ago
  Maybe the problem is the MessageBox method.
  - dvt 8y ago
    Given an even closer look, you're right ;) I saw MessageBox here[1] and assumed the implementation would just go through. After all, why would all other components compile fine, except for MessageBox? But actually, it even logs in the console dl_mapping_symbol MessageBox - proc name MessageBox not matched So yep, MessageBox has no matched symbols so it crashes and burns. [1] https://github.com/roozbehid/WasmWinforms/blob/master/winforms/external/mono/mcs/class/Managed.Windows.Forms/System.Windows.Forms/MessageBox.cs https://github.com/roozbehid/WasmWinforms/blob/master/winfor...
croddin 8y ago
That is really cool that that is possible! Could the same approach be used for WPF? How do WinForms and WPF differ at that layer? Would WPF be a lot bigger of a project than WinForms?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Kind of, Uno allows for UWP on WebAssembly. https://platform.uno/ https://platform.uno/ Yes I know it isn't the same XAML.
  - ygra 8y ago
    Well, it is the same XAML, it just uses different controls from a different namespace. At its heart XAML is just a way of encoding object graphs in XML and can work with pretty much anything that has a default ctor and properties. As far as generic serialization formats for XML go it's one of the nicer ones in my book.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      My opinion as well, the side remark as oriented towards those that always complain about WPF, Silverlight, UWP and Xamarin XAML being a bit different, when they actually share the same underlying concepts anyway.
kmote00 8y ago
From the ReadMe: "There are many many bugs and this project/product is not at all recommended for production. It is pre-alpha phase!"
brian_herman__ 8y ago
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- bsaul 8y ago
  i saw that video in the past, but watching it again now took me 15 minutes to realize this was supposed to be a fun video about an absurd future.
bdcravens 8y ago
So ActiveX (or its offspring) in the browser is apparently back :-) On a positive note, as I watch the assemblies load, Angular sites with 50k or so npm packages doesn't seem so heavy :-)
- raisedbyninjas 8y ago
  ActiveX has never left IE (not Edge). Although Microsoft patches have broken it a few times. So you can run Winforms in the browser on a full Microsoft supported stack for the time being.
josteink 8y ago
I wonder at what point Apple is going to add wasm-support to iOS. It’s starting to feel quite left behind at this point.
- davidhyde 8y ago
  I think you may well be wrong. Safari supports wasm. Here is an example for everyone who is reading this from an iOS device. https://suy.io/geopattern/ https://suy.io/geopattern/ Sooo, unity webgl may not work on iOS but that doesn’t mean wasm itself doesn’t work.
- comex 8y ago
  Just tested, and this demo runs fine on iOS. It's kind of funny to use a classic Windows-style interface on a touchscreen. Loading time needs work, though.
  - josteink 8y ago
    Might be a ram thing. I tested on my iPhone SE and even while waiting a long time, it didn't seem to provide any visible results. Edit: Trying it in Firefox desktop it fails too[1], so obviously this is not really fully cross-browser compatible yet. [1] RangeError: bad Memory initial size mono.js:1181:26 <anonymous> https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:1181 https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono...
    - comex 8y ago
      Makes sense. According to other comments in the thread [1] the page requests a wasm heap of 1.25 GB (...hopefully unnecessarily!), while the iPhone SE has 2GB of RAM total, so it's easy to imagine that the remaining amount isn't enough for both other allocations in Safari and other processes. I tested it on my iPhone X which has 3GB of RAM – not that much more, but apparently enough. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18983109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18983109
      - 8y ago
AdeptusAquinas 8y ago
THE CYCLE IS COMPLETE! More seriously, looking forward to when CLR can compile down to web assembly directly rather than requiring a large runtime. Baby steps.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  CoreRT is working towards that, but it is still pretty much WIP.
- kej 8y ago
  This is one of the targets of the CoreRT project, and a very limited version of it works today.
dare0505 8y ago
Wow, does this mean that (in the near future) we'll be able to take that HUGE repository of WinForms apps and port them to the web? Would be exciting...
- cm2187 8y ago
  Agree. To me the greatest application will be intranet apps and mobile web apps.
- int_19h 8y ago
  They will run, but of course the WinForms UI is not exactly optimized for mobile (even high DPI support is patchy).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jijji 8y ago
I gave up after five minutes with a screen that said "Loading...". Any reason why <textarea> was thought to be so inefficient?
shawnb576 8y ago
I was one of the main engineers on Windows Forms circa 1998-2005. This blows my mind in so many ways.
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Must have been fun! Any interesting stories to share about that time period?
- Pxtl 8y ago
  Cool! On the one hand I feel like we all deserve an apology, but on the other hand that's a massive system with the kind of developer-base we could only dream of. Seriously though, why were the fonts hard-coded to use ms sans serif instead of the OS default font (eg Segoe UI last time I checked?)
  - fxfan 8y ago
    That's such an insulting thing to say without really pointing out any substantial problems? I may hate their practices but their dev tools have always been absolutely top-notch within their (locked down) garden. No company has ever come anywhere close to emulating that, closed garden or not.
    - Pxtl 8y ago
      Good-natured ribbing doesn't come over text, sadly. Seriously I have tremendous respect for anybody who works on a project that massive, I just meant it in the sense of "there are two kinds of languages, the kind people complain about and the kind nobody uses". Of course there were a lot of jagged edges in winforms (like the font thing) - I never used a GUI framework that didn't have any of those.
      - shawnb576 8y ago
        Haha, nah it's all good. Honestly I'm shocked (shocked!) that I still see Winforms on resumes to this day. My real claim to fame is the VS Property Browser, which is System.Windows.Forms.PropertyGrid to this day. I love seeing new versions of VS and being like "yep, still there, that's m'baby". Lots of stories, here's some quickies: - Windows Forms was originally WFC from the Visual J++ project. Anders Hejlsberg was the architect as one of his first MS roles, working with him was a huge impact on my career. - The Winforms team was, I think the first team to ever use C#, which was called COOL (C-Like Obj Oriented Language). Before then we were using a Java-like language that ran on the CLR - The .NET Framework originated as a mash-up of the Winforms and ASP.NET teams, who were busy building frameworks separately for a while. - The .NET project was a boiled ocean - everything was new from the runtime (CLR) to the tool (VS.NET), and two languages (C#, VB.NET). We didn't have a working debugger until late in the cycle, everything was always on the floor. This might be an anti pattern. - I don't remember exactly what the story was with the font...20 years!... but my guess would be that it had to do with dealing with different versions of Windows and which fonts were installed.
jug 8y ago
Well now this was an unexpected early UI API for Web Assembly.
catmanjan 8y ago
Does anyone have an example/list of popular applications that use .NET WinForms? The only ones I can think of are bespoke...
jmkni 8y ago
Now we just need to embed this in an MVVM WPF application!
vedantroy 8y ago
Something I've wondered about with Web Assembly applications is, how do I actually view the web assembly/compiled blob? E.g--with normal Javascript, I can go to "sources" tab in developer tools and download all the JS, but how do I download the wasm? Am I misunderstanding how web assembly works?
- DrJokepu 8y ago
  It's there, if you look at the Network tab in the Dev Tools you will find the mono.wasm binary.
- testvox 8y ago
  If you are using a fairly new version of chrome any wasm should indeed show up under sources, under a special wasm domain. It looks like this https://webassemblycode.com/wp-content/uploads/Chrome-Wasm-Debug-WasmView.png https://webassemblycode.com/wp-content/uploads/Chrome-Wasm-D... It doesn't show the source file because the browser is not actually aware of where the js on the page got the wasm its running from. From the browser's perspective it just fetched an opaque file and then separately got told to run some wasm. You can see the actual source file for the wasm for one of the demos here, it still shows up in the network tab (but for example if the js on the page generated the wasm then it wouldn't). https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/mono.wasm https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/mono.wasm
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 8y ago
  You already cannot get anything usefull out from minified JavaScript.
nly 8y ago
Similar to Qt for WebAssembly: http://example.qt.io/qt-webassembly/widgets/richtext/textedit/textedit.html http://example.qt.io/qt-webassembly/widgets/richtext/textedi...
- mbel 8y ago
  And somehow it's more snappy and responsive than some of the pages that are done in HTML today, amazing.
_underfl0w_ 8y ago
Am I the only one worried about how much easier this might make it to trick our less-tech-savvy friends into thinking their device "has a virus"? Might be enough to confuse my parents, at least.
- cwbrandsma 8y ago
  That was the original goal of asp.net webforms and WinForms, to make it easy to write apps that would work on web and windows with the same code ... this back in 2001. They gave up, and we were stuck with ViewState (and the horrors within)
- untog 8y ago
  It's just rendering to a canvas tag so it's not doing anything you can't already do in a browser (and haven't been able to do for years)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
miguelrochefort 8y ago
A similar project is Uno. It lets you run UWP apps on iOS, Android and WebAssembly. https://github.com/nventive/Uno https://github.com/nventive/Uno
asien 8y ago
The more WASM projects are being released , the more I’m telling myself that WASM has nothing to offers to regular JavaScript developers. Solutions like this have already existed and still exist today. ASP.NET Webforms was basically the same attempt as this but with HTML5 base controls. Running .NET on the browser was a great idea on paper for cross-platform application , but seing how much time it takes to load the entire .NET framework it’s just isn’t a suitable solutions for production.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I think the point is that you won’t need to load the entire .net framework when the technology has matured. You can probably get away with a 1MB binaries if it is compiled server side, only shipping the dependencies used, etc. I don’t think this will ever replace javascript for common websites. But think intranet applications, online trading platforms or webmails, or mobile web apps.
- manigandham 8y ago
  This isn't a real project, it's just an experiment. Blazor is the official Microsoft project that uses a small .NET runtime with Razor components and is already smaller and faster than many JS bundles without any optimizations.
krob 8y ago
That thing is glitchy as F. My machine used almost 1.5gb of ram running that thing. Couldn't barely drag the window or click any buttons, and froze my mouse cursor.
tomduncalf 8y ago
WebAssembly is amazing technology and in my experience is already pretty mature and can do incredible things. Definitely worth taking some time to understand it I think, especially if you have experience with “non-web” languages like C/C++. I thought Lin Clark’s cartoon intro was excellent: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webassembly/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webasse...
skocznymroczny 8y ago
Why does it look like Windows 95?
tyfon 8y ago
Am I the only one that reads "Watcom assembler" when I see WASM? :) In any case, it's pretty insane what they do now but I sort of fail to see how W(eb) assembly is different from let's say a Java applet? It is not native code is it?

229 points by yread 8y ago

dvh 8y ago

ERROR> https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js(1181) https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono...: Uncaught RangeError: WebAssembly.Memory(): could not allocate memory

amaccuish 8y ago
I got RangeError: bad Memory initial size
- adzm 8y ago
  Calculator demo uses around 1.5gb of memory so I wouldn't be surprised if it runs into various memory pressure issues.
  - dvh 8y ago
    That explains it as I have only 512MB.
    - leeman2016 8y ago
      Wow. Is that a VM or an actual PC?
      - dvh 8y ago
        Mobile
    - yread 8y ago
      "The original WinForms ran on it so this new stuff should as well", right?
- est31 8y ago
  I get that same error in Firefox, but in Chrome it works. Sigh.
chrismorgan 8y ago
var TOTAL_MEMORY = Module["TOTAL_MEMORY"] || 1258291200; That is, if the module doesn’t specify how much memory it wants (and it doesn’t), then it asks for around 1.25 GB.

dvt 8y ago

Calculator example breaks when attempting to divide by zero: Uncaught abort(20) at Error at jsStackTrace (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:1063:12) at stackTrace (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:1077:11) at abort (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:18097:43) at nullFunc_ii (https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:14694:2) at b20 (wasm-function[10723]:31) at emterpret (wasm-function[922]:12351) at _do_icall (wasm-function[8343]:63) at emterpret (wasm-function[922]:7917) at _interp_exec_method_full (wasm-function[7977]:65) at emterpret (wasm-function[922]:7129) Which is weird, because in the actual code[1], there's a division by zero check which should pop up a message box: case '/': if (opr2 != 0) { result = (opr1 / opr2).ToString(); } else { MessageBox.Show("Can't divide by zero"); } break; Given a closer look, I doubt this is a WasmWinforms bug, but rather mono-wasm (or somewhere else along the compilation pipeline). Edit: I'm wrong, it's a WasmWinforms bug. [1] https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Simple-Calculator-54ec8e4a https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Simple-Calcul...

hokkos 8y ago
Maybe the problem is the MessageBox method.
- dvt 8y ago
  Given an even closer look, you're right ;) I saw MessageBox here[1] and assumed the implementation would just go through. After all, why would all other components compile fine, except for MessageBox? But actually, it even logs in the console dl_mapping_symbol MessageBox - proc name MessageBox not matched So yep, MessageBox has no matched symbols so it crashes and burns. [1] https://github.com/roozbehid/WasmWinforms/blob/master/winforms/external/mono/mcs/class/Managed.Windows.Forms/System.Windows.Forms/MessageBox.cs https://github.com/roozbehid/WasmWinforms/blob/master/winfor...

croddin 8y ago

That is really cool that that is possible! Could the same approach be used for WPF? How do WinForms and WPF differ at that layer? Would WPF be a lot bigger of a project than WinForms?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 8y ago
Kind of, Uno allows for UWP on WebAssembly. https://platform.uno/ https://platform.uno/ Yes I know it isn't the same XAML.
- ygra 8y ago
  Well, it is the same XAML, it just uses different controls from a different namespace. At its heart XAML is just a way of encoding object graphs in XML and can work with pretty much anything that has a default ctor and properties. As far as generic serialization formats for XML go it's one of the nicer ones in my book.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    My opinion as well, the side remark as oriented towards those that always complain about WPF, Silverlight, UWP and Xamarin XAML being a bit different, when they actually share the same underlying concepts anyway.

kmote00 8y ago

From the ReadMe: "There are many many bugs and this project/product is not at all recommended for production. It is pre-alpha phase!"

brian_herman__ 8y ago

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

bsaul 8y ago
i saw that video in the past, but watching it again now took me 15 minutes to realize this was supposed to be a fun video about an absurd future.

bdcravens 8y ago

So ActiveX (or its offspring) in the browser is apparently back :-) On a positive note, as I watch the assemblies load, Angular sites with 50k or so npm packages doesn't seem so heavy :-)

raisedbyninjas 8y ago
ActiveX has never left IE (not Edge). Although Microsoft patches have broken it a few times. So you can run Winforms in the browser on a full Microsoft supported stack for the time being.

josteink 8y ago

I wonder at what point Apple is going to add wasm-support to iOS. It’s starting to feel quite left behind at this point.

davidhyde 8y ago
I think you may well be wrong. Safari supports wasm. Here is an example for everyone who is reading this from an iOS device. https://suy.io/geopattern/ https://suy.io/geopattern/ Sooo, unity webgl may not work on iOS but that doesn’t mean wasm itself doesn’t work.
comex 8y ago
Just tested, and this demo runs fine on iOS. It's kind of funny to use a classic Windows-style interface on a touchscreen. Loading time needs work, though.
- josteink 8y ago
  Might be a ram thing. I tested on my iPhone SE and even while waiting a long time, it didn't seem to provide any visible results. Edit: Trying it in Firefox desktop it fails too[1], so obviously this is not really fully cross-browser compatible yet. [1] RangeError: bad Memory initial size mono.js:1181:26 <anonymous> https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono.js:1181 https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/Calculator/mono...
  - comex 8y ago
    Makes sense. According to other comments in the thread [1] the page requests a wasm heap of 1.25 GB (...hopefully unnecessarily!), while the iPhone SE has 2GB of RAM total, so it's easy to imagine that the remaining amount isn't enough for both other allocations in Safari and other processes. I tested it on my iPhone X which has 3GB of RAM – not that much more, but apparently enough. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18983109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18983109
    - 8y ago

AdeptusAquinas 8y ago

THE CYCLE IS COMPLETE! More seriously, looking forward to when CLR can compile down to web assembly directly rather than requiring a large runtime. Baby steps.

pjmlp 8y ago
CoreRT is working towards that, but it is still pretty much WIP.
kej 8y ago
This is one of the targets of the CoreRT project, and a very limited version of it works today.

dare0505 8y ago

Wow, does this mean that (in the near future) we'll be able to take that HUGE repository of WinForms apps and port them to the web? Would be exciting...

cm2187 8y ago
Agree. To me the greatest application will be intranet apps and mobile web apps.
int_19h 8y ago
They will run, but of course the WinForms UI is not exactly optimized for mobile (even high DPI support is patchy).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jijji 8y ago

I gave up after five minutes with a screen that said "Loading...". Any reason why <textarea> was thought to be so inefficient?

shawnb576 8y ago

I was one of the main engineers on Windows Forms circa 1998-2005. This blows my mind in so many ways.

glenneroo 8y ago
Must have been fun! Any interesting stories to share about that time period?
Pxtl 8y ago
Cool! On the one hand I feel like we all deserve an apology, but on the other hand that's a massive system with the kind of developer-base we could only dream of. Seriously though, why were the fonts hard-coded to use ms sans serif instead of the OS default font (eg Segoe UI last time I checked?)
- fxfan 8y ago
  That's such an insulting thing to say without really pointing out any substantial problems? I may hate their practices but their dev tools have always been absolutely top-notch within their (locked down) garden. No company has ever come anywhere close to emulating that, closed garden or not.
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    Good-natured ribbing doesn't come over text, sadly. Seriously I have tremendous respect for anybody who works on a project that massive, I just meant it in the sense of "there are two kinds of languages, the kind people complain about and the kind nobody uses". Of course there were a lot of jagged edges in winforms (like the font thing) - I never used a GUI framework that didn't have any of those.
    - shawnb576 8y ago
      Haha, nah it's all good. Honestly I'm shocked (shocked!) that I still see Winforms on resumes to this day. My real claim to fame is the VS Property Browser, which is System.Windows.Forms.PropertyGrid to this day. I love seeing new versions of VS and being like "yep, still there, that's m'baby". Lots of stories, here's some quickies: - Windows Forms was originally WFC from the Visual J++ project. Anders Hejlsberg was the architect as one of his first MS roles, working with him was a huge impact on my career. - The Winforms team was, I think the first team to ever use C#, which was called COOL (C-Like Obj Oriented Language). Before then we were using a Java-like language that ran on the CLR - The .NET Framework originated as a mash-up of the Winforms and ASP.NET teams, who were busy building frameworks separately for a while. - The .NET project was a boiled ocean - everything was new from the runtime (CLR) to the tool (VS.NET), and two languages (C#, VB.NET). We didn't have a working debugger until late in the cycle, everything was always on the floor. This might be an anti pattern. - I don't remember exactly what the story was with the font...20 years!... but my guess would be that it had to do with dealing with different versions of Windows and which fonts were installed.

jug 8y ago

Well now this was an unexpected early UI API for Web Assembly.

catmanjan 8y ago

Does anyone have an example/list of popular applications that use .NET WinForms? The only ones I can think of are bespoke...

jmkni 8y ago

Now we just need to embed this in an MVVM WPF application!

vedantroy 8y ago

Something I've wondered about with Web Assembly applications is, how do I actually view the web assembly/compiled blob? E.g--with normal Javascript, I can go to "sources" tab in developer tools and download all the JS, but how do I download the wasm? Am I misunderstanding how web assembly works?

DrJokepu 8y ago
It's there, if you look at the Network tab in the Dev Tools you will find the mono.wasm binary.
testvox 8y ago
If you are using a fairly new version of chrome any wasm should indeed show up under sources, under a special wasm domain. It looks like this https://webassemblycode.com/wp-content/uploads/Chrome-Wasm-Debug-WasmView.png https://webassemblycode.com/wp-content/uploads/Chrome-Wasm-D... It doesn't show the source file because the browser is not actually aware of where the js on the page got the wasm its running from. From the browser's perspective it just fetched an opaque file and then separately got told to run some wasm. You can see the actual source file for the wasm for one of the demos here, it still shows up in the network tab (but for example if the js on the page generated the wasm then it wouldn't). https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/mono.wasm https://webassembly.z19.web.core.windows.net/mono.wasm
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 8y ago
You already cannot get anything usefull out from minified JavaScript.

nly 8y ago

Similar to Qt for WebAssembly: http://example.qt.io/qt-webassembly/widgets/richtext/textedit/textedit.html http://example.qt.io/qt-webassembly/widgets/richtext/textedi...

mbel 8y ago
And somehow it's more snappy and responsive than some of the pages that are done in HTML today, amazing.

_underfl0w_ 8y ago

Am I the only one worried about how much easier this might make it to trick our less-tech-savvy friends into thinking their device "has a virus"? Might be enough to confuse my parents, at least.

cwbrandsma 8y ago
That was the original goal of asp.net webforms and WinForms, to make it easy to write apps that would work on web and windows with the same code ... this back in 2001. They gave up, and we were stuck with ViewState (and the horrors within)
untog 8y ago
It's just rendering to a canvas tag so it's not doing anything you can't already do in a browser (and haven't been able to do for years)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

miguelrochefort 8y ago

A similar project is Uno. It lets you run UWP apps on iOS, Android and WebAssembly. https://github.com/nventive/Uno https://github.com/nventive/Uno

asien 8y ago

The more WASM projects are being released , the more I’m telling myself that WASM has nothing to offers to regular JavaScript developers. Solutions like this have already existed and still exist today. ASP.NET Webforms was basically the same attempt as this but with HTML5 base controls. Running .NET on the browser was a great idea on paper for cross-platform application , but seing how much time it takes to load the entire .NET framework it’s just isn’t a suitable solutions for production.

cm2187 8y ago
I think the point is that you won’t need to load the entire .net framework when the technology has matured. You can probably get away with a 1MB binaries if it is compiled server side, only shipping the dependencies used, etc. I don’t think this will ever replace javascript for common websites. But think intranet applications, online trading platforms or webmails, or mobile web apps.
manigandham 8y ago
This isn't a real project, it's just an experiment. Blazor is the official Microsoft project that uses a small .NET runtime with Razor components and is already smaller and faster than many JS bundles without any optimizations.

krob 8y ago

That thing is glitchy as F. My machine used almost 1.5gb of ram running that thing. Couldn't barely drag the window or click any buttons, and froze my mouse cursor.

tomduncalf 8y ago

WebAssembly is amazing technology and in my experience is already pretty mature and can do incredible things. Definitely worth taking some time to understand it I think, especially if you have experience with “non-web” languages like C/C++. I thought Lin Clark’s cartoon intro was excellent: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webassembly/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webasse...

skocznymroczny 8y ago

Why does it look like Windows 95?

tyfon 8y ago

Am I the only one that reads "Watcom assembler" when I see WASM? :) In any case, it's pretty insane what they do now but I sort of fail to see how W(eb) assembly is different from let's say a Java applet? It is not native code is it?