Project Online & 0.1 (Alpha) Released

Hi folks,

This is the first official release of WebKit .NET, a library written in C# allowing easy integration of the WebKit rendering engine in .NET applications. The code is still in very early stages but is shaping up to become fully functional quite soon.

First a bit of history to explain my motivation for the project. A few years back I started work on WebKit .NET as a side project to the ‘Swift’ web browser which was one of the first to incorporate WebKit on Windows. Back then WebKit was a very different monster with limited (but exciting) functionality under Windows. Swift went through several pre-beta releases, and various side projects were created such as the now-dormant ‘swiftdotnet’ which utilised my early attempts at WebKit .NET. However neither project really made it to a fully functional stable release. A couple of years on, I have decided to revive WebKit .NET as a standalone project due to the continuing lack of a C# WebKit control and the stability of WebKit on Windows today.

This leads us to the first alpha-stage release today. Two packages are available for download, a source package containing a Visual C# 2008 project for the WebKit .NET control library and a sample browser application (also written in C#), and a binary package which contains the compiled binaries. Both packages include the Cairo port of the WebKit library and its dependencies, built using Visual C++ 2008. If you wish to build your own version of the WebKit library, please follow the instructions on the WebKit developers wiki. Should you want to simply try WebKit .NET out for yourself in a .NET project, I recommend you grab the binary package.

At the moment, WebKit .NET requires version 2.0 of the .NET framework. I have attempted to run the sample application (but not compile it) using Mono 2.2, which didn’t work, however Mono support is something I will definitely work on in the future.

Thanks for your interest in WebKit .NET,

Peter