Hosting a Windows Form Control in WPF
On top of this core functionality of the HwndHost class, deriving classes handle
details germane to their specific framework. As of this writing, WPF
exposes only one such specialization: the WindowsFormsHost class from the System.Windows.Forms.Integration namespace and
the WindowsFormsIntegration assembly.
The WindowsFormsHost class has
properties for background, font, and tab index properties to provide
integration at those points with WPF. Example B-1 shows how to
declaratively add a WindowsFormsHost
element to a Window.
Example B-1. Adding an HWND host to a WPF tree
<!-- Window1.xaml -->
<Window ...>
<Grid>
<WindowsFormsHost />
</Grid>
</Window>Example B-1 creates an
instance of the WindowsFormsHost
control, which introduces an HWND into WPF's tree, as shown in Figure B-3.

Figure B-3. Adding an HWND to a WPF application using the WindowsFormsHost
With an HWND injected into the WPF tree, we can now host a control
from the HWND-based UI framework with which WPF integrates best: Windows
Forms. For example, after adding a reference to the System.Windows.Forms assembly to the project,
we can host a DataGridView control,
as shown in Example B-2.
Example B-2. Hosting a Windows Forms DataGridView in WPF
<!-- Window1.xaml --> <Window ... xmlns:wf="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Forms;assembly=System.Windows.Forms"> <Grid> <WindowsFormsHost> <wf:DataGridView ...