Put the Web in a Window

There's no shortage of reasons why you might want to integrate a web page window into your application. Maybe you want to show your company web site, create a customized browser, or display HTML product documentation. In .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1, you could use a web browser window through COM interop, but there were a number of quirky or missing features. The new WebBrowser control in .NET 2.0 addresses these issues with easy web integration, support for printing and saving documents, and the ability to stop a user from navigating to the wrong web site.

Note

. NET's new managed WebBrowser control lets you show an HTML page or allow a user to browse a web site from inside your Windows application—with no interop headaches.

How do I do that?

The System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser control wraps an Internet Explorer window. You can drop the WebBrowser control onto any Windows form straight from the Visual Studio .NET toolbox.

To direct the WebBrowser to show a page, you simply set the Url property to the target web page. All navigation in the WebBrowser is asynchronous, which means your code continues running while the page is downloading. To check if the page is complete, verify that the ReadyState property is Completed or, better yet, react to a WebBrowser event.