Programming Visual Basic 2005

Displaying Web Documents

Create a new form and name it frmWeb.

Resize the form to 800,700 and drag a Web Browser from the Toolbox onto the new form. You'll find that it fills the form. Click on the smart tab and click on the "Undock in parent container" link, as shown in Figure 3-4.

Figure 3-4. Undock the web form

Shrink the web form down just enough to add a text box (which you'll name txtURL) and four buttons (btnGo, btnHome, btnPrevious, and btnNext), as shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5. Designing the web browser

Setting Web Browser Event Handlers

It would be useful to disable the Previous button when it is not possible to go back any further, and to disable the Next button when there is no next page. The Web Browser has two properties (CanGoBack and CanGoForward ) that you can test. Rather than testing these every time the form is navigated, it's more efficient to respond to the events that fire when these properties change—CanGoBackChanged and CanGoForwardChanged—as shown in Example 3-4.

Example 3-4. CanGoBackChanged and CanGoForward event handlers

Private Sub WebBrowser1_CanGoBackChanged( _
ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles WebBrowser1.CanGoBackChanged
   btnPrevious.Enabled = WebBrowser1.CanGoBack
End Sub

Private Sub WebBrowser1_CanGoForwardChanged