I have a normal console app .net core project with some classes, but I can't use a web browser. I want to navigate to a specified URL but with the web browser like in windows forms application, not just to start a process of my chrome. Like webbrowser.navigate function but I can't use it I don't know why?
Console applications are strictly text-based. Text in, text out, cursor position and not much else. They cannot have any UI controls or output. As such UI components such a text boxes, dropboxes, WebBrowser, etc. won't work as you expect if they work at all. While the console application may be hosted in a window (so you can see the output), your access is limited to what can be controlled via the Console class, which doesn't include any graphics or direct access to the window. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.console?view=net-5.0
Your only real options are to launch a browser (or other application), or convert your application to a non-console application capable of displaying graphical controls like WebBrowser.
It is technically possible to use WebBrowser in a console application (See https://www.codeproject.com/Questions/197007/How-Use-WebBrowser-without-winform), but be aware it won't actually display anything on screen, so it's use is limited.
Related
I want to embedd an application (Hikvision iVMS-4200) into my winform .net application. The application appears to use custom rendering for its GUI, and a loading screen appears before the main window is launched.
In more detail, I want the window of this app to be confined within the window area of my application in a locked position (user can't move the embedded window), and display other things in the same parent window (for example a picture).
I have tried solutions such as this. It worked perfectly, but only with notepad. This solution doesn't work with the application I want (the process is opened successfuly but it is in a completely independant window).
My guess is that the app (again, Hikvision iVMS-4200) uses OpenGL for a custom GUI or another type of non-native GUI library. As a though, shouldn't any application on windows have atleast a single main window? could I access and edit its position and parenting properties? Any solution would be highly appreciated.
Context:
I am beginning to write a testing application in C# which, as part of testing, needs to do UI automation of another Windows desktop application written in Electron, to extract certain results and compare with expected output.
The Electron application has a few hyperlinks, and HTML style buttons, which I need to locate and click.
The Electron application is written by another team and I cannot ask them to include testing features in the UI.
Question:
How can I dynamically find the position of the hyperlink with the text "Login" within the Electron application and click it from my C# application?
I have been able to start the Electron application programmatically, bring it to foreground and send keystrokes to it. Now I need to click on the Login hyperlink.
I have read many similar questions but most are for testing native Windows applications.
EDIT 1:
If I loop over all the child windows of the Electron application, I find only 2 windows. It seems Electron does not render hyperlinks or other HTML elements as Windows.
If I use SendMessage to read the window text, it only returns "Chrome Legacy Window".
I have a win form application and i'm trying to run it inside the web browser,i rummaged through web and found some links:
I tried this link:Embedding a .NET WinForms Application in an Internet Browser Using WPF
,this works fine but the problem is that the end-user has to install dot net frame work for running the application.
I found another link here for running a WinForms Application Inside Web Browser,with Visual WebGui development framework.
Has anyone had any experience with WebGui?
Well, Visual WebGui is web over ASP.NET. Its developing experience is the same/similar to that of Windows Forms using the Visual WebGui designer integrated into Visual Studio. You do your code behind just the same as you would on Windows Forms and the WebGui runtime transforms it into HTML5/CSS/JS.
The efforts needed to convert your Windows Forms application to a equivialend Visual WebGui web application will depend on the (3rd party / .NET) components used in your Windows Forms application. The Visual WebGui API is farily similar to that of Windows Forms, so in some cases you can add a few references to WebGui specific assemblies and then to a search/replace for a couple of namespaces. There are of course some differences, as these are two different platforms, but the developing experience is quite similar to Windows Forms.
winforms is not web. Web is Web.
Web means HTML + something (usually JavaScript, CSS and probably jQuery or such).
1 - If you need a web application, and want to do it with .Net, create an ASP.Net Application.
2 - If you need a Windows application (Desktop), create a WPF application.
3 - If you need a Windows 8 "Metro" style application (a.k.a Windows Store App), create a WinRT XAML application.
4 - winforms is completely useless. Forget that.
If your customers don't want to install any version of the .Net Framework, your only option is #1.
A winforms application will NEVER be a web application, regardless of any hacks you do to make it run inside a web browser.
an XBAP (WPF Browser Application) is also NOT a web application. It's just a regular WPF client application that does not have it's own window.
Edit:
If you did things the right way (that is, maintaing separation of concerns and putting application logic in Controllers or ViewModels instead of the horrible code behind practices most winforms developers are generally used to), It should not be that hard to reuse your application logic and create a new application (web or otherwise) while maintaining the Data Access and Business Logic layers intact.
I think this question is very similar to this one:
Is it possible to convert a WinForm to a WebForm in .NET?
As mentioned before, the only way to run the application "as is" inside a browser will be through the use of some activex control and that would require IE + .NET Framework.
There are tools that you can use to automatically migrate the application to the Web, but there will always be some manual effort involved and it won't be the same as building the application from scratch as a web app.
In my limited experience with Visual WebGui, it is pretty cool technology. In simple terms, as I understand it, you can use the Windows Forms development IDE to create an HTML5-compliant ASP.NET client/server web application... not just a web site or page, with a look and feel very much like a Windows forms desktop application. It does this by converting Winforms controls to jquery code on the client side, and stores most of the executable code on the server side.
I've used it to create simple applications for testing purposes, and there are a few caveats. First, to create a "pretty" website, you need to rethink the Winforms layout to make it web-like, with headers, sidebars, etc. It's a different paradigm, and users expect certain things on a website. The good news is that this adjustment can often be done fairly easy by simply manipulating controls; i.e. a Panel control can become a container for a sidebar or header. You can also create "themes", which are like skins for the controls to modify the appearance.
Another consideration is that events for things like popup dialog boxes behave differently in a web environment. In Winforms program execution halts until the user clicks an "OK" button or something. Within Visual WebGui, all the execution happens on the server side; thus, program execution would continue without waiting for user input. This can be handled by creating a Form.Close handler for the popup box though. But these kinds of differences need to be kept in mind.
You also must consider object layout anomalies. Visual WebGui does a good job generally of mimicking the Winforms WYSIWYG benefit: Objects normally appear pretty close on the webpage to where you put them in the environment. But this isn't always the case; you need to play around with object padding, margins, etc. sometimes to get the right layout. Still it is often much easier than tediously changing spacing with CSS or div objects.
Thinfinity VirtualUI allows you to do so by adding a small line of code to your C# application so it can then be accessed from any OS and device via an HTML-able browser.
https://www.cybelesoft.com/thinfinity/virtualui/web-integration-for-windows-apps/
I've used VWG but it's not really an option anymore. One option not mentioned here is WiseJ, a proprietary framework which is still under active development and support in 2022. And it is fairly straightforward to convert a WinForms app to WiseJ, or begin using WiseJ like you would WinForms.
They are located here: https://wisej.com
I'm building a C# desktop app with a simple UI. Due to my familiarity with HTML/CSS, and a previous web-based iteration of a very similar app, it would be ideal if I could re-use some existing HTML/CSS pages I have as the UI for this new desktop app.
Is that do-able with C#? Can anyone show a simple example of using an HTML/CSS page as the UI of a C# desktop application?
Other answers are dated, new good options:
Electron + Electron-Edge - is the way to go for a new Electron app that communicates to a .NET backend (a DLL). Widely used and supported.
Neutronium - best for already-written .NET WPF apps that need a HTML UI. Requires using Vue. Less popular and less supported.
CefSharp (https://github.com/cefsharp/CefSharp) is a good way to embed chromium, but you still need a web server. Take a look at http://www.ultidev.com/products/Cassini/ to alternative for IIS.
You can use WebBrowser control to add Web browser functionality to your application.
You can create your own html(s) and set your WebBrowser control to display those pages. You can navigate by clicking hyperlinks or by using keyboard shortcuts to move backward and forward through navigation history. By default, you can access additional browser functionality through the right-click shortcut menu
You can even manage those pages centrally (for e.g. on LAN) and all clients on LAN can connect to this central location. This way you can modify pages centrally.
Check a walkthrough on MSDN:
How to: Add Web Browser Capabilities to a Windows Forms Application
You can try to use a Chromium-based control - DotNetBrowser. This control provides wide interactivity options, like DOM manipulation and DOM events, which can be useful in your case.
In addition, there is an article that demonstrates how to use a web page as HTML UI in a C# desktop application: https://www.infoq.com/articles/html-desktop-net
Affiliation disclosure: I work with the team, which created DotNetBrowser.
You could try adding a Web Browser control to a forms application to show your page. But this will need to be remotely hosted as the code will not be able to execute locally, except if you listen for the specific links in c# and then perform the actions.
You could also try your hand at WPF which is a new technology to create good looking gui's with mark-up much like html, which you'll pick up pretty quickly with your html experience.
Unfortunately neither WinForms or WPF is sufficiently like HTML/CSS to be of that kind of use. You'll be able to reuse the layout-concepts and art of course. And, with WPF being the closest thing to it, you might even keep a lot of the code-behind code.
But the short answer is: No
I am trying to create a parent WPF/surface application which will host multiple WPF/surface applications. I am looking for some pointers of how to implement such functionality. Was reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742522.aspx but it talks about hosting Win32 content in WPF and vice versa.
My idea is to have something similar to MDI forms where you have a main form and you can instantiate multiple child forms.
In my case, these would be different applications which will be launched using a config file and loaded within the main application.
Also, since is there a way to ensure that the main window's process memory is not hogged by the child process initiated.
Edit:
The host application will launch different applications based on what user selects. One can say its like an application launcher which are build on WPF/Surface touch SDK. Now once the application is launched the launcher goes in the background(except showing small button to bring it forward again at some point later) and when the user ends the current application launcher comes back again in foreground. The only interaction i feel which is necessary is knowing the launched application is terminated or invoking applications in a limited screen area. If someone has seen the Microsoft surface application launcher, even when the application is launched there are corner buttons which bring the app launcher to foreground.
I would first look at using Microsoft Prism, specifically the Modularity namespace.
Except for the "different applications" part, it sounds like a classic case for MVVM. Are these "different applications" actually separate applications, or could they simply be separate projects within the same application? That may simplify the choice of presentation.
I suppose you could still have a View called "Host" that presents a different app.
Of course, WPF doesn't have the concept of MDI, but you can open multiple, non-modal windows.
It really depends on what you mean by "hosting". Does the main window need to somehow handle and/or interact with the other applications, or is it just a launching pad for other applications?
I followed this approach to solve this problem. The launcher was not hosting the application within itself but would launch a new application and hide itself.
Steps I followed:
The main launcher application will run in Kiosk mode i.e always on top/no option to close by capturing the close event/No instance shown in taskbar/no title bar/killing the explorer.exe/hiding the taskbar.
The launcher populates a horizontal listbox (data templated for UI) which lets occupied main center area of screen and can be scrolled either ways.
When user selected an item on listbox, click/tap event a separate process is launched with launcher window's visibility set to hidden and a small button(basically a window with just a button inside and size set to height/width of button) created on the either corner of the screen with always on top option.
The functionality of button is to minimize the current working application and set visibility of launcher back to visible and setting the focus to this window.
Since the process is launched by launcher, i trap the close event for the launched window to know user ended the application and then again pop up the launcher back.