C# WinForms: Should I use a web browser control

Question

I am building a windows forms application that I will be adding a control within that will display quite a bit of different data. For the most part the data inside will be navigation buttons and help/training text.

I think it would be ideal if I could write the contents in HTML and then just display that in the control in the application, but I am not sure if this is a good idea.

Another point to note is there will be a web based version of the same application at some point in the near future, and doing this part of the application in HTML will make for very easy reusability.

The users will not have IIS installed, if this matters.

Answer 1

For this purpose, I think that an embedded web browser would be absolutely great. Alot of applications use a web browser control for navigation, information, training, etc. Steam is one example. In addition, reusability is almost always a best practice.

But I would use WebKit instead of the built-in IE web browser control.

Answer 2

I have a similar application and I think the WebBrowser control works very well. If you think it's what you need, I would for it and there's many other applications that do something similar. You can call Javascript functions in the HTML page from C# using HtmlDocument.InvokeScript(), and C# from Javascript using window.external and having this two-way communication makes life simple.

Users do not need IIS installed as you're not running a web server, just displaying content using HTML.

I would go for the built-in IE control rather than webkitdotnet to be honest. Although WebKit itself is superior to IE, the webkitdotnet project at version 0.5 it doesn't have the C#<> JavaScript communication or DOM access and it seems hard to tell if it's still being actively developed. It'll be great if/when it gets feature parity as IE is obviously far from perfect, but the advantage of the built-in IE control is every user of your app will have it already installed and the WebBrowser control is well tested. There are some disadvantages I've found:

• IE versions may range from 6 to 9, so you'll to test to make sure your content works in all (as with a website).
• There's a bug in IE (at least up to 8) that relative links do not work in combination with a <base href="file://...">. This can stop you being able to use relative links in your local HTML documents.
• Sometimes pages display differently inside the WebBrowser control than they do out of it. For instance, http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/7104 is one and I've come across another similar bug affecting cufon.
• For compatibility reasons, even if your users install IE > 7 the WebBrowser control will still render your content in IE7 rendering mode by default. This is different to standalone IE which renders in the most-standard mode by default, so it can catch you out if you're not expecting it. You can change this by adding <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" tag if you want, though I actually found it makes life easier as it reduces the amount of different versions you've got to test against.