Developing Applications with the WebBrowser Control

Abstract

The WebBrowser control is a great way for developers to interface their applications with the Internet. On the surface it presents itself as a bare-bones, wrappable instance of IE that is useful in a wide variety of applications: basic browser windows, kiosks, application start pages, and so on. However, underneath this basic exterior lies a great system that exposes the underlying application and object model in a simple way. The .NET Framework ups the ante even more by simplifying the process of accessing IE’s internal interfaces and events.This chapter demonstrated how you can use the WebBrowser control in a number of ways. We got started with the basics: finding the libraries, preparing them for interop, referencing them, and spinning them into a C# project. Next, I discussed basic integration points and built a simple web browser using this control, an address bar, and some buttons. Event handling methods followed; I demonstrated how you can tailor your code to react to IE’s application and page events. After getting these basics down, I talked about a deeper integration with IE’s features: handling windows, displaying information such as download progress, and executing commands through OLE. I followed with a presentation of the object model and examples of how objects exposed from the browser window and documents can be accessed and traversed by your code. Finally, I broke into some more advanced examples of how IE features may be used through invocation of the browser’s public API.KeywordsVisual StudioMenu ItemBrowser WindowWindow ObjectHome ButtonThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.