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Andrew Armstrong
Andrew Armstrong

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Rewriting an 11-year-old WinForms app in Go and WebView2

#go #windows #showdev #refactoring

Hi DEV! Ultimate Settings Panel is a free Windows tool I've maintained since 2014 — 250+ Windows settings, tools, diagnostics and commands behind one search box. Version 8.0 is a complete rewrite, and the interesting part isn't the app, it's what the old one was doing.

The problem with the old version

It was C#/WinForms sitting on MetroFramework, which stopped being maintained years ago. That alone would be reason enough. But the bigger issue was how it launched things.

To run a classic Control Panel applet or a shell command, the old version wrote a script to disk and invoked it through mshta. It worked. It is also, more or less exactly, the behaviour that antivirus heuristics are built to catch — and they were right to be suspicious. Any tool doing that is one signature update away from being quarantined, and the user has no way to tell the difference between my app and something genuinely nasty.

What 8.0 does instead

A small Go program (no CGO) that renders the panel in a Microsoft Edge WebView2 window, with a JavaScript-to-Go bridge handling the launching. Nothing is written to disk. The UI is HTML, so the same panel ships as a standalone index.html web edition — browsers can't launch local programs, for good reason, so those items give you Copy and Get .bat instead, while ms-settings: deep links and web links still work directly.

GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 CGO_ENABLED=0 \
  go build -trimpath -ldflags="-H windowsgui -s -w" -o "Ultimate Settings Panel.exe" .
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

That's the whole build. One binary, no runtime to install, no installer.

What I deleted

This was the genuinely satisfying part. Google Analytics. Internet Explorer entries. Telnet "tricks" that stopped working somewhere around Windows 8. Google+ links. A rewrite is the only time you get to honestly audit an eleven-year-old feature list, and roughly a third of it was dead weight.

What replaced it: Windows 11 ms-settings: deep links, a Terminal & Shell category (Windows Terminal, PowerShell 7, winget), modern diagnostics (sfc /scannow, DISM RestoreHealth, battery and Wi-Fi reports, Winsock reset), favourites, light/dark themes and .bat export.

Links

Happy to talk about the WebView2 embedding, why Go rather than staying on .NET, or the JavaScript-to-Go bridge. If you maintain something old enough to have an mshta call in it, I'd genuinely like to hear what you replaced it with.

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