Can WPF and WinForms be mixed within an application?

Question

Can both WPF and Windows forms controls be used within one application? How difficult or practical an idea is this?

Answer 1

It is fairly straightforward to host WPF controls in a WinForms app with an ElementHost adapter or WinForms controls in a WPF app with a WindowsFormsHost adapter. There are not too many resources on the web showing how to do either of these, however. In the process of learning how to do this for myself I quickly discovered the inherent symmetries between the two pathways. I distilled all my notes into an article comparing and contrasting these symmetries using a unique approach: the article is really two side-by-side articles, comparing every step in detail, starting from creating a user control in one technology to hosting it in an application in the "opposite" technology. My article, published on SimpleTalk.com in August 2010 is available here: Mixing WPF and WinForms.

For completeness, here are a couple good MSDN references, one for each pathway. In fact, the demo solution accompanying my article started from both of these:

• Hosting a Windows Forms Composite Control in WPF
• Hosting a WPF Control in Windows Forms

Answer 2

I believe there is a WindowsFormsHost control you can put in your WPF apps which will do interop back to WinForms code:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ivo_manolov/archive/2007/07/26/wpf-win32-interop-part-1-hosting-winforms-controls-in-wpf-windows.aspx