Question/Request: Self contained

[Quasozial]

Hey, i would love to use this tech, but i sadly cant presuppose that all my clients have the .net runtime installed.

Is there any way to deploy the app as self contained or smth, so the runtime doesent have to be installed?

[RubenPX]

This should help you https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot

[Quasozial]

Wouldnt that be a problem, because Dynamic DLL Loading is used here?

[RubenPX]

Yes... My bad. I will search for something more. And it's not viable, because tauri need call dotnet methods to load dlls.

I will try to search more info to try make this.

Maybe i can embeed dotnet, but size of binary it's possible that will increase too much

[Quasozial]

yea its probably increasing by more than 100mb. Currently we do that, we ship an WPF Application as self contained with the runtime and its round about 100-200mb

[RubenPX]

Yeah... I know... Download .net 9.0 (Desktop only) their size is around 60mb (and it's compressed)

[Quasozial]

Hmm,

i really like this solution here. Because we use as a standard codebase c# but me and my colleague dont like WPF or anything, we are more from the Vue side, so this project is fire for us. I really hope there will be a solution for this

[RubenPX]

I don't like wpf too... I my case, personally i like develop with svelte/sveltekit

[RubenPX]

I found this... I will investigate this weekend
https://github.com/dotnet/samples/tree/main/core/nativeaot/NativeLibrary

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/libraries

Is more like develop with C# transpile to C and load assembly like C

[Quasozial]

Yea i saw that to after the native aot hint, but it was a bit sketchy for me xD but when it works, it would be fire!

[RubenPX]

I tried, but i can't make to work without .net installed...

[Quasozial]

hm thats pretty sad, but thanks for your help

[DonMatron]

Hi, I think it is possible to install wanted .net runtime during app installation process. If you target OS is Windows, then you can inject .net runtime installer into nsis directly.

It has to be configured in tauri.conf.json:

{
  "bundle": {
    "windows": {
      "nsis": {
        "installerHooks": "<path to your .net runtime installation hook>"
      }
    }
  }
}

I was not able to create such hook and postponed this issue, since NSIS is pretty tough xD. But my guess is that is possible to use NSIS_HOOK_PREINSTALL to install .net runtime before actual app installation process.

[RubenPX]

@DonMatron that should be a nice solution, i will investigate more. Maybe nsis can detect if dotnet is installed or better, maybe can detect specific version

[ilayo17]

Hello @RubenPX @Quasozial @DonMatron @plainionist

Sorry for the ping in advance.
Not really related to the question, but as I am considering using this method in production (100-200 users daily), I would like to ask a quick question.

Have you ever had a problem with potential defender/any AV detection?
In theory it shouldn't be a big deal, but when I've tried to test it in virtual machines, I've triggered a detection once. I don't know if that was just a unluck and it will not be a problem or maybe this method will keep triggering defender. Anyway, I preferred to ask before I spend days working on the tool.

Thanks in advance for the answer and have a nice day!

[RubenPX]

@ilayo17

Don't worry for the ping, i'm here to help a developers comunity 😉

For me i never had problems with antivirus. But one thing that you can make is sign your binary. This avoid too much problems with antivirus

https://v2.tauri.app/distribute/sign/windows/