Building an Internet Explorer Extension/Add-On? - c#

I would like to build a browser extension for IE 7/8. I would like to do it using .NET. Do you know of any resources or tutorials that I could reference to do this? I haven't found much.
Thanks!

JP,
One of the main issues that makes IE extensions hard to develop is the need to develop with C, or .NET.
On the other side, FF and Chrome use (to some extent) JS, which is easier, and has a much lower entrance barrier (How many C "web developers" do you know?).
This is one of the issues / obstacle Crossrider is here to solve.
You can create your first IE plugin within minutes. It will save you a lot of research and development time, and you can write your code with Javascript.
On top of that, if you plan this plugin/extension to also work for browsers other than IE then you can develop a cross browser extension once, using an extensive unified API, and we will make it work for Chrome and Firefox.
Chrome and Firefox each one gets a a native extension file (CRX and XPI respectively) while IE a special EXE engine to run your app.
(Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Crossrider)

The same question that was asked two years later has the necessary answer. Everyone should refer to this question now:
How to get started with developing Internet Explorer extensions?

Related

Automated Web Interaction without Selenium / ChromeDriver

The goal is to provide a lightweight application (probably .NET) that will provide very limited functionality to interact with a specific web application in our organization (it's Workday, if that helps.)
We have so far done this successfully using Selenium -- requiring each user to have Chrome installed and - importantly - to have the version of chromedriver.exe that is compatible with their Chromium version. Most of the application consists of chromedriver.FindElementByXPath(x).Click and chromedriver.FindElementByXPath(x).SendKeys(t) statements.
However, it's becoming cumbersome to ensure that the right chromedriver is installed for all the users, and we'd like this application to be agnostic about the browser (or at least, support any installation of Chrome, Edge, Firefox on the user's device.)
So the simple question is -- can we execute simple activities against the site (clicking some of the button tiles and sendkeys to populate textboxes) without Selenium?
I'm looking into possibly using Microsoft UI Automation or something that can simply handle clicks and text entry through GETs and POSTs (and no, using an API is probably not an option.)
Don't work too hard studying the link you provided. Why? Because the question is not asking to automate anything but a browser app. Unless of course your app embeds a browser... Automating desktop applications is difficult but can be done.
I'd look deeply into Microsoft's Playwright. It's a Selenium free product for browser automation. It's current team of engineers are the best in the industry, many of them were on the Puppeteer project at Google. Apart from Cypress, Playwright appears to be best in class now. The problem with Cypress is that you have to run it in a pseudo IDE based in a dedicated browser.

enable javascript on webbrowser control win ec 7

this is my first post in here.
I searched all over the web for a solution to this problem, but i have not found nothing.
I only read that Webbrowser haven't much support for javascript in win ec7.
But my first question is:
-Why a web page with javascript works fine in IE in wec7 and doesn't work in a webbrowser on the same platform?
I enabled all script options from the control panel, but it still not works.
How can I make the page works in webbrowser as it works in ie?
Thanks in advance for the help or the tips.
bennaloz
Q.
-Why a web page with javascript works fine in IE in wec7 and doesn't work in a webbrowser on the same platform?
A.
The compact framework has a much smaller Operating System than full blown Windows, otherwise it would be too large to fit on the device.
To make the compact framework smaller, many features that Microsoft could not foresee a use for were left off.
When Windows CE and Windows Mobile were first introduced, not many people were trying to use these devices to look at online content. A web browser was included, but a lot of things in this web browser were also limited (for the same reasons). Therefore, some JavaScript may work while other JavaScript will not.
Nothing is guaranteed to work with JavaScript, though.

C# XNA code on the web for a standard browser

Apparently, there is a way to add C# XNA projects to websites such that they can be viewed on the site from a normal web browser, presumably there are concessions to safety that the browser will enforce.
How is this done?
edit: I think the C# project might only ever runs on the server, the client being sent something it can understand.
There is http://jsil.org which will convert a compiled .Net application into a client side Javascript "app" ... and has been demonstrated to work rather successfully on XNA games.
It only handles 2D stuff and sound is / was needing to manually rewritten last time I checked but it does a pretty impressive job from what I've seen of it.
It should be noted that whilst this may get the job done, it's certainly not going to produce JS that is anywhere near the quality (i.e. maintainability) of a game that was written in JS from the start (using something like three.js or easle.js)... so if this for a commercial product, you may wish to explore rewriting / porting the game specifically for web as a serious alternative.
This isn't possible without a plugin. The plugin would work only on Windows, obviously, since XNA is built on DirectX.
There's no plugin that currently does this, to my knowledge.
It's not difficult to write a plugin, however, you'd have to do this for each browser you want the plugin to run in.
If you want your game content on the web, a better route is probably HTML5 and its Canvas functionality, which works on all modern browsers. You might be interested in this article, which discusses porting a 2D XNA game to HTML5 Canvas.
If you need 3D support, you could go the HTML5 WebGL route, although Internet Explorer doesn't support it.
Probably what you want is Google Native Client (NaCl). I haven't played with it (yet), but as far as I know, some game engines like Unity works on it.
Hope it helps.

Creating application on Windows platform which enters to the secure area of website

First of all, sorry for my English :)
I'm web developer. Generally coding in PHP.
Recently started to learn C++.
I want to create simple application which will simplfy daily routine works. For ex,Every time when I check my internet banking account, must login to my account via any browser. What I wanna do is, to create mini windows application which will store my login and pass, will login to my account, and show exact page what I see on browser directly after login. Website that I'm talking about is here
The problem, I can't find any tutorial about creating such application. Don't know where to start. Did research but found nothing about this. (Maybe I selected wrong keywords :)) So decided to post question here. I don't need your code, just give me starting point, where to learn to create applications as I described above.
And one more question: Is it important to know website's coding language before building such windows apps? I mean: PHP/C#... etc
Thx in advance
Not sure why you would pick C++ for this type of project, though it's possible, it would be quite tedious. I would recommend looking into Java, perl, ruby, python, or some other language that supports the Selenium Webdriver API. You can also use the mechanize API with Perl, which is also a bit tedious. I've done things like this in the past with success using Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org). Unfortunately, I don't think there is a Webdriver API for C++ as of yet (you could try writing one!), but there are definitely APIs available for the other languages I posted. Check out: http://seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.html#programming-languages.
EDIT
If you're more interested in screen scraping with C++, this question, and some answers within the thread, may prove useful to you as well: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/489522/library-recommendation-c-html-parser

GeckoFX Update for Gecko 2.0?

I was really excited when I found GeckoFX last month. My employer wants to distribute an embedded browser with our desktop application (to smooth the transition from desktop-based apps to web-based apps), and being able to use Gecko rather than IE was a miracle!
The latest versions of GeckoFX I can find use versions 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 of the Gecko engine (Xulrunner). This works just fine, but it's missing a lot of the goodies that shipped with Firefox 4 (Gecko 2.0) this week.
I already have the distribution of Xulrunner 2.0, but GeckoFX won't work with it out of the box. Some of the XPCOM API has changed, and I'm sure there are a lot of other minor incompatibilities. I'd say it should be an easy fix, but I'm not a C++ developer so I really have no idea.
What I'm looking for right now is one of the following, in order of preference:
An already-built update of GeckoFX that's compatible with Xulrunner 2.0
Another solution that allows me to embed a Gecko-powered web browser in a C# Windows application.
Advice on where to start to update GeckoFX myself (by advice I mean hold-my-hand-and-talk-to-me-like-I'm-6 advice)
Just digging in to the code and trying to sort through all the errors doesn't help. I keep getting an InvalidCastException when trying to create an instance of nsIWebBrowser (and no, I can't get more descriptive than that because that's all the error message and stack trace show!). It's been a lot of head scratching and pointless Googling since it seems no one's kicked off an embedded Firefox 4 yet.
Ideas? Suggestions?
In the absence of deeper help, I took the time to dig in and figure things out on my own. The trick was understanding ComImport, which is something I haven't used before.
It turns out, Mozilla changed the GUIDs of some of the API methods exposed by XPCOM. Most importantly, the GUID for nsIWebBrowser changed from 69E5DF00-7B8B-11d3-AF61-00A024FFC08C to 33e9d001-caab-4ba9-8961-54902f197202.
Making this one change in nsInterfaces.cs actually fixed quite a bit.
Going through line-by-line and reconciling build errors (despite cryptic error messages) allowed me to finish out the system and create a build that does indeed run XULRunner 2.0.
Unfortunately, being able to build and run Gecko 2 and exposing the entire API are two very different things. I've created a project on Google Code to house a complete rewrite of GeckoFX for Gecko 2: Leapin' Lizard. It's essentially a fork of the original Skybound.Gecko code, and distributed under the same open source licenses.
So I now have a build of GeckoFX that's compatible with XULRunner 2.0. It just needs to be polished.
At the moment there is no pre-compiled library that wraps XulRunner 4.0. I am the author of MozNET, a Mozilla wrapper build that is actually being actively developed. I do have a semi-working build, utilizing XulRunner 2.0 but, it is not yet complete. Due to the changes made in XulRunner 2.0 there are still a ton of changes to in order to make MozNET fully compatible with the new build. At the moment I have full browsing support, nearly-complete DOM object access and full spell check support. The build is a work in progress as I am still maintaining and supporting MozNET 1.9.2.17.

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