WebBrowser as Canvas Background

Question

I like to add a WebBrowser control as a Canvas background in WPF using C#. How do I do this? I have the following code at the moment. But does not work.

<Canvas
  Name="canvas"
  Grid.ColumnSpan="4"
  Grid.Row="1"
  MouseDown="Canvas_MouseDown"
  MouseMove="Canvas_MouseMove"
  MouseUp="Canvas_MouseUp"
  Margin="0,0,0,16"
  Grid.RowSpan="3">
  <Canvas.Background>
    <VisualBrush>
      <VisualBrush.Visual>
        <WebBrowser
          x:Name="wbMain"
          Height="246"
          Width="592" />
      </VisualBrush.Visual>
    </VisualBrush>
  </Canvas.Background>
</Canvas>

Answer 1

You cannot do this. The web browser control is an Internet Explorer ActiveX wrapper with the resulting airspace issues.

However, you can draw on top of it using the <Popup> control or if you don't mind losing the interactivity, try generating an image of the web page and use it as the Canvas background.

If you are thinking about using the WPF Chrome wrapper by Chris Cavanagh, bear in mind:

• It does not yet support COM-Visible (so no window.external javascript methods back to your C# code)
• It has a dependency on Awesomium which is only free for non-commercial use.
• It will add over 10MB to your code size as it needs to embed Chromium