Is it possible to use Katana to host an existing WebForms application within a WinForms application?

Question

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:

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

And this is what I want to achieve:

(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?

Answer 1

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.