Techie Blog gEEK fACTOR 8/10

Winforms and WinFX Interoperability

There was two sides to this talk, hosting winforms within Avalon (sorry Windows presentation foundation) and hosting WPF forms in Windows forms.

Windows has an ElementHost control to display Avalon WPF forms. WPF alternatively uses WindowsFormsHost to display Windows forms within Avalon...sorry WPF.

References need to be made to the various host controls.

When using WPF you need to create mappings to the Windows controls within the XAML code. Alternatively you can use code behind to populate the WPF forms.

You will need to design the WPF forms using a designer such as the one in the new set of graphics tools (cannot remember the name must be my bed time).

There is also another Alpha code bug at the moemnt in so much as you need to edit the visual studio project file in notepad to set some missing properties. This will change for release.

One important consideration is that if you are going to host one technology within the other then you will not be on the same message loop so click events in one will not be captured by the other. Not without some complex plumbing either way, not to be advised.

The decision to use WPF should be an indiviual one based on some of the following:

Traing requiremnents

ROI

Visual Designers

ControlsVisual Studio Integration

The secret is to try and identify somewhere that could benefit from using the WPF functionality.

Complete integration of this tool is scheduled for the Orcas timeframe. Orcas is the next version of Visual Studio following version 2005 due out in November.