Develop Reference

Is there any way to fully control browser from application?

I was trying to make a pc application that helps people more conveniently when they are using a browser(e.g Chrome, Firefox, Edge ...)
For example, the application shows the default browser and let user can choose another browser as default if they want to, and the app shows all windows that are currently opened; Overmore, when the user clicks a specific window then app will focus the window.
user can select default browser
user can see all windows categorized by browser type
So, my initial planning was using Election js; however, I've found that there is no way to control a browser from the Electron application since Node js cannot access the users' system(this thinking could be wrong since I have poor English😥)
After some research, I'm guessing C# can do that by using windows api. I've saw this post that saying by using DDE, we can get tabs urls.
But I'm wondering if C# can fully control a browser; for instance, create a new window, notice if music or video is playing in the tab, request to browser for getting favorites list.
If it cannot, how about requesting api to the browser from pc application?

You cannot fully control a browser. Internet Explorer was the only browser that had a documented and supported API to control, inspect and automate. Internet Explorer is dead so this is a dead end. The basic DDE control interface is also outdated.
Accessing favorites and the content of open tabs is limited because evil people would use such APIs to inject and spy. If you want to access the favorites you will have to write custom code for each browser.
Using the accessibility and UI automation APIs is the only reliable and supported way of interacting with modern browsers. SetWinEventHook can be used to detect window creation and primitive state changes. MSAA/UI Automation needs to be used to get more information from each browser window.
The thumbnail API and/or magnifier API can be used to get the preview image.
To open a new tab, execute a new process with the URL on the command line. Some per-browser customization might be required (-new-tab parameter etc).
Use IApplicationAssociationRegistration::QueryCurrentDefault to detect the default browser.

Kentico custom table data editing issue

Custom table's data hangs on the loading screen after saving any changes. This is happening on some of tables and it seems that the majority of records are saved, however I have noticed a couple that didn't save within some custom table until reapplying the change!
I was wondering what can cause the issue.

I have found the issue using browser's developer tools.
Issue
Clicking save button was creating
Mixed Content: The page at 'https://address' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure form action 'http://address'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS. JS error on the browser and browser was blocking the content. However, the form action was not pointing to absolute URL address.
Solution
As the server SSL config was fine, therefore, there was not any other way than changing core CustomTableForm.ascx.cs Kentico file. Although it is not recommended. The problem solved by developing RedirectUrlAfterSave property of customTableFormobject to make sure it will redirect correct protocol instead of Absolute URL
Hope it will help you guys.

This was just brought to my attention, not sure how I missed it before. So, I will post my answer just for the future reference :-)
I guess there is some SLL offloading going on before the actual IIS where Kentico is running. In this case, SSL Accelerator must be implemented. The link goes to Xperience 13 version but the same idea applies for older versions. Just use the version selector in the top bar - there could be some API differences.
And the same applies e.g. when uploading media files - the browser console will show mixed content warning. This is for security reasons. Browser sees the HTTPS but behind the offloader there is HTTP communication and the GetAbsoluteURL method takes the protocol from the request. Thus, mixed content. Using the ssl accelerator will tell Kentico to use HTTPS internally.

Webbrowser control issue with cookies

i have created web browser control in c#. I used to open .net website into this control. Once page is completely loaded.i was using cookies of this browser control to create httprequest and used to execute request. I used to get data which was needed for me.
But all of sudden this stopped working. I checkd to see what happened then i found that issues are with cookies are being formed throught browser control.For example, if i use page url on IE browser and then get cookie and supply it to httprequest. It works good. But same thing with web browser control is not working now.
Another thing, Forget about httprequest, Download from webbrowser control itselft is also failing. But its working in IE. What could be stopping it to download fail in web browser control and work in IE.
Dont understand how.please help.

This issue is not with the cookies. it is with the browser emulation. By default webbrowser control take IE emulation. but if you need to mention which browser version you want control to use. By using registry.

I emulated IE to my application by changing registry information. and it started working.

Listening for http requests in a windows forms application

I've got to write a .net windows forms application that will open a webpage and then be able to react to the user clicking on certain links on the webpage. The specification I've been given has the links on the webpage just being http links.
Is there a way for my .net application to have a minimal web server on it which will allow it to handle http requests on a given port?

Use an HttpListener.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httplistener.aspx

If all you need is to show a webpage, and you don't have any restrictions on the browser used, then the WebBrowser control will do the trick.
Drag it on to your form
Set the Url property to the page you need to display
Attach to the Navigating event
You can now respond to clicks, cancel them, do whatever you like. If it's just responding to client-side clicks you need, you don't need a web server. If you DO need a webserver, WinForms shouldn't have anything to do with it.
webBrowser1.Navigating += new WebBrowserNavigatingEventHandler(webBrowser1_Navigating);
private void webBrowser1_Navigating(object sender,
WebBrowserNavigatingEventArgs e)
{
//Do your thing... maybe set e.Cancel if you don't to navigate
}

Please look at the WebBrowser control and specifically the "ObjectForScripting" property. If you set it to the parent form you can actually handle javascript events from the page loaded in the webbrowser in your c# code!!!
I hope that helps!

There are different ways to do this depending on what functionality you need. If all you need to do is respond to click events, and you don't need "full" http protocol support, you can just open a socket and parse what comes in from the browser.
Alternatively, you can use HttpListener, which takes care of the http protocol parsing for you and is relatively easy to use. For what I think you need, this is probably the preferred approach. Simple, non-compiling example here: https://gist.github.com/1770645.
The "holy grail" is hosting the ASP.NET runtime in your windows forms application. I've done this and it is pretty involved. The runtime has to be hosted in a separate AppDomain, so you end up jumping through a lot of hoops to get everything running and hooked up. It also involves writing an implementation of HttpWorkerRequest that is more full featured that the framework provided SimpleWorkerRequest. Incidentally, this also works for windows services, which gives you a great way to provide service management and monitoring through a browser without having a dependency on IIS.

I have interpreted the question differently to other users, so maybe I am way off but, I read it as he is trying to render web pages from the web and react to a user clicking on a link within the web page.
The only way I can think of doing this is by using some form of renderer ie webkit and hooking into that to intercept the clicks a user makes.

You can use Nancy
Site of project: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/694907/Embed-a-web-server-in-a-windows-service

Invoke javascript methods on a page

Is there a way using either C# or a scripting language, such as Python, to load up a website in the user's default webbrowser and continue to interact it via code (e.g. invoke existing Javascript methods)? When using WinForms, you can host a Webbrowser control and invoke scripts from there, but only IE is supported. Is there a way of doing the same thing in the user's default browser (not necessarily using WinForms)?
Update: The website is stored on the user's machine, not served from a third party server. It is a help page which works dynamically with my C# program. When the user interacts with my C# program, I want to be able to execute the Javascript methods on the website.

You might want to look into Selenium. It can automate interaction with FireFox, IE, Chrome (with chromedriver) and Opera. It may not be suitable for your purposes due to the fact that it uses a fresh, stripped down profile, rather than the user's normal browser profile.

If you look at the HTTP request header you can determine the user-agent making the request. Based upon that information you can write logic from the server side as to respond with a unique page per detected user-agent string. Then you add any unique JavaScript you want as a static string to be executed by the user-agent application.