C# Snippet Tutorial - The Web Browser Control [Beginner]

OK, so you may be thinking to yourself "Why do I need a browser control when I have Firefox or IE?". Well, considering it has all the power of Internet Explorer, you can use it for lots of things. You can use it to show a website in your application or even just load in an HTML file from the local computer. The greatest thing is that it is quite easy to use and control.

So the first thing you want to do is get a browser on the window. Go ahead and start up Visual Studio and create a new project, call it whatever you wish. Next you need to add the web browser control, which is in Common Controls in your toolbox on the Design View tab. Once you have that up, the first thing we need to do is get the browser to browse someplace. This is fairly easy to do put needs some slight explanation.

Getting the WebBroswer Control in the
Toolbox

In order to change the URL, you are going to use WebBrowser.URL, which makes sense. But the URL property uses an object called Uri which stands for Uniform Resource Identifier. This class just gives you an easy to use object for internet and local paths, and gives you the ability to compare and combine them as well. Since the URL has to be such an object, changing the URL of our browser object looks like so:

webBrowser1.Url = new Uri("http://blog.paranoidferret.com");

One of the upsides is that whenever you change the URL, the page loads automatically. So when you call the code above, you are essentially changing the location of the browser. This makes it easy to create a nice simple browser. Now the object itself draws off of the current IE install, so any plugins and addons will be available inside the object. This means flash and such objects will work as long as the plugins are installed in IE.

Now beside directly changing the URL, there is actually a method called WebBrowser.Navigate() which takes in a string URL and navigates to the site. This is probably the best way to browse with the control, and by far the easiest. The browser control also keeps a history, just like IE, and offers the functions WebBrowser.GoBack() and WebBrowser.GoForward(). Also, since it pretty much just uses an IE tab for the object, you can also call WebBrowser.GoHome(), which as you guessed takes you to the IE homepage.

This is pretty much the basis of the WebBrowser control. It is simple and easy to use, offering a full browser object that can be used with very little code. There are so many reasons this can be useful and just plan cool.

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C# Snippet - Shuffling a Dictionary [Beginner]

Randomizing something can be a daunting task, especially with all the algorithms out there. However, sometimes you just need to shuffle things up, in a simple, yet effective manner. Today we are going to take a quick look at an easy and simple way to randomize a dictionary, which is most likely something that you may be using in a complex application. The tricky thing about ordering dictionaries is that...well they are not ordered to begin with. Typically they are a chaotic collection of key/value pairs. There is no first element or last element, just elements. This is why it is a little tricky to randomize them. Before we get started, we need to build a quick dictionary. For this tutorial, we will be doing an extremely simple string/int dictionary, but rest assured the steps we take can be used for any kind of dictionary you can come up with, no matter what object types you use. Dictionary < String , int > origin = new Dictionary < string , int >(); ...

C# WPF Printing Part 2 - Pagination [Intermediate]

About two weeks ago, we had a tutorial here at SOTC on the basics of printing in WPF . It covered the standard stuff, like popping the print dialog, and what you needed to do to print visuals (both created in XAML and on the fly). But really, that's barely scratching the surface - any decent printing system in pretty much any application needs to be able to do a lot more than that. So today, we are going to take one more baby step forward into the world of printing - we are going to take a look at pagination. The main class that we will need to do pagination is the DocumentPaginator . I mentioned this class very briefly in the previous tutorial, but only in the context of the printing methods on PrintDialog , PrintVisual (which we focused on last time) and PrintDocument (which we will be focusing on today). This PrintDocument function takes a DocumentPaginator to print - and this is why we need to create one. Unfortunately, making a DocumentPaginator is not as easy as...

C# WPF Tutorial - Implementing IScrollInfo [Advanced]

The ScrollViewer in WPF is pretty handy (and quite flexible) - especially when compared to what you had to work with in WinForms ( ScrollableControl ). 98% of the time, I can make the ScrollViewer do what I need it to for the given situation. Those other 2 percent, though, can get kind of hairy. Fortunately, WPF provides the IScrollInfo interface - which is what we will be talking about today. So what is IScrollInfo ? Well, it is a way to take over the logic behind scrolling, while still maintaining the look and feel of the standard ScrollViewer . Now, first off, why in the world would we want to do that? To answer that question, I'm going to take a an example from a tutorial that is over a year old now - Creating a Custom Panel Control . In that tutorial, we created our own custom WPF panel (that animated!). One of the issues with that panel though (and the WPF WrapPanel in general) is that you have to disable the horizontal scrollbar if you put the panel in a ScrollV...

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