Using Windows runtime features

WinJS provides a complete API to use Windows runtime features and device specific features. When accessing the device specific features using WinJS, the web application should run as a windows application and accessing it from a browser will result in an error. Also, Microsoft has released the concept of Hosted apps which enable any web application to host as a windows application with a few configuration steps.

Hosted apps and accessing the camera

Hosted apps were introduced with the launch of UWP. Let's create a simple example to convert a simple ASP.NET core application into a Windows application using the Hosted app concept and access the camera.

Creating the ASP.NET core application

Create a simple ASP.NET core application in Visual Studio 2015 and add the WinJS packages through NPM. Here is the code snippet of package.json:

{
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "name": "ASP.NET",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "winjs": "4.4.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
...