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Recently I have read a lot about OWIN and Katana and also tried examples like "Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API".

I am currently rather clueless about whether it is possible to use these technologies to host an existing WebForms ASP.NET application without any IIS, completely within a desktop application (WinForms or Console).

I.e. this is what I have:

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(An existing web application, accessed by users through a web browser over the Internet)

And this is what I want to achieve:

enter image description here

(The same existing web application files, hosted locally inside a Katana process and accessed through a webbrowser through a localhost URL)

This would be helpful to ship two versions (web and Windows) of our application with rather few effort.

My question:

Is it possible today or in the near future to create such a scenario?

Uwe Keim
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1 Answers1

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Currently Katana with version 2.0.0 out in the internet - only Nancy, SignalR, WebApi, FubuMvc, Simple.Web have OWIN adapters to run over it. You can refer to this page for supported frameworks (refer to frameworks section) on OWIN/Katana. In future yes its a vision to have all frameworks like MVC, asp.net webforms to run on the top of OWIN/katana. For now the answer is - its not possible.

Praburaj
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  • Thanks a lot! Seems that you know what you are talking about as your profile states you directly work for Microsoft on Katana. Is this "in the future" something like 12 months or more than 2-3 years? – Uwe Keim Oct 17 '13 at 14:23
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    I'm unsure about the timelines, but you can certainly make a feature request at https://katanaproject.codeplex.com/. If there is more demand (votes) it may get prioritized accordingly. – Praburaj Oct 17 '13 at 16:59
  • I know it is an old thread, but “yes its a vision to have all frameworks like MVC, asp.net webforms to run on the top of OWIN/katana” is never part of Microsoft's plan. WebForms binds too deep to System.Web, while OWIN/Katana was trying to get rid of it. Thus, WebForms was out of its scope almost from the beginning. – Lex Li May 16 '17 at 16:54