winforms - Hosting ASP.NET within my application

Question

I had a wild thought today. I've been discovering that my users like my web UIs more than my WinForms UIs...but there are good reasons to still write a 'smart client' application.

Can I write my application UI in ASP.NET/MVC, host it inside my client exe, and locally access it using the IE control in my winforms app?

Is there a lightweight asp.net server I can host in-process or fork off? Has anyone tried this? Did the results flatter?

Answer 1

You can use the Cassini web server.

http://www.asp.net/Downloads/archived/cassini/

3.5 download: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmitryr/archive/2008/10/03/cassini-for-framework-3-5.aspx

v2 download: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmitryr/archive/2006/03/09/cassini-update.aspx