WebBrowser

[Rick]

Not that I am into conspiracy theories, but concerning the WebBrowser
control I kind of wonder. Did Microsoft pay off the OpenNETCF and
IntelliProg guys to abandon their controls (which actually worked) to use
the one included with CF 2.0?! The CF 2.0 WebBrowser control is a joke
compared to the ones made by OpenNETCF and IntelliProg.

There seems to be no way to get the information about the URL clicked on in
either the Navigating or DocumentCompleted events. The web page will not
scroll to any HTML anchor in the current document. No programmatic page
up/down capability for reading through the document. No way to change the
Zoom factor when viewing the document. The list goes on and on. This is
nothing more than a simple viewer, and not a very functional one at that!

Yes, I am venting as I have spent countless hours try to find a way around
all of these limitations - and to no avail! Does anyone want to write a
real WebBrowser control? I would be happy to finance the operation. It has
to be cheaper than replacing the hair I am pulling out ;-)

 

[Guest]

We're listening. What features that our old control are not in the new CF
2.0 control - that is was out old control any better than what CF 2.0 has?
If so, then a regression is unacceptable and we'll bring our control forward
in SDF 2.0 at the least.

Not that I'm promising anything, but if we did work on the SDF 1.4 browser
control, what addition features would you want to see? Put them in order in
the event that we decide to do the work but can't provide everything.

Chris Tacke
Principal Partner
OpenNETCF Consulting, LLC

 

[Mark Erikson]

Image loading on WM 2003 devices would be nice. I spent a fair chunk
of time trying to get it to cooperate, with little success. What was
really frustrating was that my image would flash on the screen for a
second, but somehow my return value wasn't getting picked up by the
native control, and so it would override my image with its own attempt,
fail, and replace it with the "not found" image. I wound up having to
write a native wrapper just to handle WM_NOTIFY, which was really
annoying.

Mark Erikson
http://www.isquaredsoftware.com

 

[Rick]

Chris,

I am happy to hear that you are open to the possiblilty of adding back your
component to the library for CF 2.0. Here are a few problems that have been
admitted to on Microsoft's own web site:

The following considerations apply only to Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC
and Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone:
1. The Refresh method throws a NotSupportedException exception.
2. Because the WebBrowser control can contain subcontrols embedded in
the HTML form, you cannot determine if the WebBrowser control has the focus
by monitoring the GotFocus event. As a workaround, use a process of
elimination of other controls that might have the focus.
3. The Url property is not set in WebBrowserNavigatingEventArgs and
returns an empty string.

Item number 3 is a huge problem for me personally. What's the point of an
event with no information? I realize that is only a problem on WM 2003, but
that is what the majority of the Pocket PCs in existense are running. It's
bad enough I cannot write code in VS2005 to support the 2002 OS, but do I
also have to abandon 2003 and 2003SE?! That's crazy talk ;-)

So here is a list of functionality not avialable in the WebBrowser from
VS2005 that your control has. Maybe some of these are no longer needed
under CF 2.0, but you can tell me that. I'm listing the ones that are
important to me, but there are many, may more that I am not listing that are
also no longer avaiable.

Properties:
URL
EnableClearType
EnableContextMenu

Methods:
JumpToAnchor
SelectAll

The HtmlViewer written by Alex Yakhnin was really sweet in that he added a
"HotSpotClick" event, and "PageUp" and "PageDown" methods. He could
definitely sell me that component again if he ported it for CF 2.0.