The Welcome wizard showed nothing until WebView2 cold-started and Blazor
booted, so the whole startup cost presented as a blank window long enough
that operators thought first boot had failed.
- Native MAUI splash overlay (renders in the first frame, no WebView2/JIT
dependency) + a visually identical in-page splash inside #app, so the
native -> webview -> Blazor handoff reads as one continuous loading
screen. Fades out on first successful WV2 NavigationCompleted.
- PublishReadyToRun=true (publish-only) to remove first-run JIT on the
one-shot cold-disk path. R2R header verified present after publish.
- Fixed-version WebView2 runtime baked offline next to the exe (build.ps1
stages it, app points WEBVIEW2_BROWSER_EXECUTABLE_FOLDER at it). Removes
the Evergreen registry probe and the LTSC "no WebView2 at all" risk flagged
in welcome-app-spec.md; air-gap friendly. Absent => falls back to Evergreen.
- De-flash launch: drop the `cmd /c` wrapper and add -WindowStyle Hidden in
autounattend FirstLogonCommands (kills the console flash + one process).
Verified: Release build clean, win-x64 self-contained publish succeeds with
R2R confirmed, 38/38 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
