djibouti
Need advice on how to update my WPF app from .net6 to .net8 with minimal disruption to users
Hello. I tend to work more in asp.net, but a couple of years ago I was asked to build a WPF application that is distributed to ~1500 users. I chose .net6 at the time as it was the latest LTS. Because of a lot of weird customizations that were required, I also built my own updating framework for it. For two years this has been fine, but now I'm being asked to upgrade it to .net8 LTS.
This presents some challenges. My application is 12MB because the installer would install .net6 desktop runtime (I'm using Advanced Installer). It's a single file application. I now need to figure out the best way to update this for all users to .net8.
I am able to push out updates to my application just fine, but I don't have a good sense for how I can upgrade to .net8. My first thought was to include it in the app, but now my size went from 12MB to something like ~184MB. This is difficult because every update would now require the full .net version, presumably. I looked into trimming but I guess that isn't supported for WPF, of course.
I also thought about maybe triggering a download of the .net8 runtime. This could work, but it's going to be really rough for us because a lot of my users have very locked down admin permissions and they tend to have very little technical knowledge. It would drive a lot of support phone calls which I would very much like to avoid.
What I'm looking for here is general advice on how you might approach this problem. I'm in the research phase right now and trying to gather all my options to see which one is best (or least worst, depending on your view). I really appreciate any advice you can give me on how to deal with this challenge. Thanks for reading 🙂
12 replies
✅ How can I use ReactJS with Asp.net core with server side HTTP calls?
Hello. I am curious what choices I have available for working with ASP.net and a React front end. I am aware there is an ASP.net template for React, however it does not seem to support server side rendering. Their docs mention:
Are there any good options available that lets me still use ASP.net core? I would prefer to share types with my back end. I looked at ReactJS.NET but it seems to not have been updated in quite some time. It has only a couple of typo fixing commits in the last couple of years.
I'm curious if anyone has good ideas for me. Thanks!
18 replies
✅ Connecting desktop client to a web app. How to link the session via SignalR?
Hello. I am trying to design a new project. I need to build a client to run on user's desktops. This client will need to be able to open other processes in the user's session.
At my company we are looking to consolidate our internal tools to a web application for the user interface. My hope is that I can have my web application (integrated with Azure AD) pass down commands to the desktop client. In the past I've used signalR to handle web sockets and the fallback if those aren't available. It has worked great.
What I can't work out is how to link the desktop client with the web application. How do I communicate the connection ID for the desktop client to the web app session? Anyone have any good ideas?
My design thoughts here may be over-engineering and flawed so criticism of that idea is welcome if you have other suggestions. I can't seem to make the mental model for how this desktop client starts up, connects to the SignalR hub, and the user's web app session knows which connection ID to transmit commands.
If I can't work out a good solution I can always revert to a WPF application and scrap the idea of integration with our web app, but I wanted to see if I could crowdsource some good ideas. Thanks for reading!
3 replies
✅ WPF Build size triples after changing target framework to net6.0-windows10.0.17763.0
Hello. My WPF application uses .net6 and recently I was asked to use 'toast' style Windows 10/11 notifications.
Easy enough - I installed
Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.Notifications and am using the ToastContentBuilder. However, in order to use the Show() method on the toast it requires changing the Target Framework from .net6.0-windows to net6.0-windows10.0.17763.0. It seemed simple enough but after doing a build I noticed my application size tripled to 34MB. I really would like to get it closer to my previous 11MB.
Digging in I can see why. Simply by changing the Target framework it's now including Microsoft.Windows.SDK.NET.dll in the build which is 23MB in size.
My question here is if there's a way for us to retain notification functionality without needing the large SDK dll? Are there any strategies to avoid this? Possibly by not changing the target framework but still leveraging the toast notification? I have no idea. Really appreciate any help here. Take care!45 replies