winforms look-n-feel when hosted in IE

[jaboir]

I'm very excited about the possibilities of applications based in
winforms, hosted in Internet Explorer and communicating to the back end
via web services. However, when I started reading about the
possibilities recently, I was disappointed by the look-n-feel that I've
been seeing.

For example, here's a good article:
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/030610.htm
with a screenshot of a trivial app just below the quote: "Hello World
message as shown in the following screenshot"

The look and feel of the button is not very good at all - I was hoping
that when hosted in IE winform apps would looks much like 'fat' winform
apps running on the desktop.

Q: is there a way to get the look-n-feel to look more 'rich' when
running in IE? Lets take the specific example of the button, I tried
playing around with the different button properties in VS, but I was
unable to get a better looking button.

TIA

J

PS: I've also been checking out the ClickOnce deployment, from a
technical perspective there isn't be much difference as in both cases
you're downloading the client to your desktop - just in IE you're
running in a sandbox of sorts... but from a marketing perspective
showing your app running in IE makes a huge difference when pitching a
0-deployment story.

 

[Robbe Morris [C# MVP]]

winforms controls in the browser are a major headache
unless you are using it strictly for an intranet application.

The browser security settings don't permit their use
by default. So, you've got to manage this yourself
via an install or manually adjusting the security settings.

 

[jaboir]

This is for an intranet application, but I thought for internet apps
that all the user needs to do is to add your site as a trusted site and
presto... off you go.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand - to clarify things a bit I was
looking for the controls to use the winXP look-n-feel. So for example
the buttons would have the rounded corners. After some poking around,
I found that I could add an 'iexplore.exe.manifest' (see contents
below) to the 'C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer' directory to achive
this... *surely* there must be a better way to get this to work for a
dll that will be downloaded and hosted within Internet Explorer! Does
anybody know of a way to get this?

--- iexplore.exe.manifest file ---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"
manifestVersion="1.0">
<assemblyIdentity
version="1.0.0.0"
processorArchitecture="X86"
name="Microsoft.Winweb.iexplore.exe"
type="win32"
/>
<description>.NET control deployment tool</description>
<dependency>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity
type="win32"
name="Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls"
version="6.0.0.0"
processorArchitecture="X86"
publicKeyToken="6595b64144ccf1df"
language="*"
/>
</dependentAssembly>
</dependency>
</assembly>