C# - Using WPF In WinForms [Beginner]

A little while back, we did a tutorial on how to embed WinFoms controls inside of WPF application (you can read all about it here). Today, we are going to flip that on its head - we are going to take a look at how to embed WPF controls inside of a WinForms application.

You might be thinking to yourself "why would someone want to do that?" A great question, and there are a couple different reasons. First, perhaps you have an application already written in WinForms, but you want to move to WPF. Instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch (which might be a large amount of work, and might be time/cost prohibitive), you can rewrite portions of the application as time allows or when you need to redo a particular section anyway.

Another reason would be if there is a area of your app that would be easy to do in WPF (maybe because of the animation features, or the composibility) while in WinForms it would be difficult.

So what do we need to do to enable this integration? Well, first off, we need to add a reference to the Visual Studio project. You do this by right clicking on "References" in the Solution Explorer and choosing "Add Reference":

Once you have the dialog up, you want to scroll to the bottom on the .NET tab and choose the "WindowsFormsIntegration" component, and hit OK:

At this point, you probably want to create the WPF user control that you want to add to your app. If its already written, you can add it through the Add Existing Item menu option, and if you need to write one, you can choose "Add New Item" and under WPF choose "User Control". In my case I want to create a new one, and I'm going to name it "MyWPFControl":

So my made-up reason why I want a WPF control in my WinForms app is that I want a custom combo box - or really a combo box with some custom items. While this is doable in WinForms, it is hard. Downright annoying in many ways. In WPF, though, its really easy, since you can put whatever you want in a ComboBoxItem. In this case, my user control consists of a combo box with three items - a circle, a triangle, and a rectangle:

<UserControl x:Class="WPFInWinForms.MyWPFControl"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Height="300" Width="300">
  <Grid>
    <ComboBox>
      <ComboBoxItem Margin="2">
        <Ellipse Width="20" Height="20" Stroke="Black" />
      </ComboBoxItem>
      <ComboBoxItem Margin="2">
        <Path Stroke="Black" Data="M 0,0 L 20,0 L 10,20 Z" />
      </ComboBoxItem>
      <ComboBoxItem Margin="2">
        <Rectangle Stroke="Black" Width="20" Height="20" />
      </ComboBoxItem>
    </ComboBox>
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

OK, now that we have the control we want to add, how do we add it? Well, there are two ways of going about this - one is through the designer, and the other is by adding the control manually in code. We are fist going to take a look at the designer way of doing things.

When we added that reference earlier, one of the things it did was give us access to a control called ElementHost. This control is for WPF in WinForms what the WindowsFormsHost was for WinForms in WPF. In the designer, you can find this control in the Toolbox underneath "WPF Interoperability":

So once you drag an ElementHost onto your form, the designer makes things really easy for you. You just click on the little arrow on the upper right of the ElementHost and you get a couple options. The one we care about is the combobox for "Select Hosted Content". When you click this, you get to choose what WPF control you want to host in the ElementHost:

Once you do that, well, thats it. You can run the app, and the WPF control will show up exactly where you put it:

Doing all of this in code is also quite easy. In fact, I'll just throw all the code up here in one block:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Windows.Forms.Integration;

namespace WPFInWinForms
{
  public partial class Form1 : Form
  {
    public Form1()
    {
      InitializeComponent();

      ElementHost elhost = new ElementHost();
      elhost.Size = new Size(110, 60);
      elhost.Location = new Point(45,35);

      MyWPFControl wpfctl = new MyWPFControl();
      elhost.Child = wpfctl;

      this.Controls.Add(elhost);
    }
  }
}

So the first thing needed is that last using statement. The ElementHost lives in that namespace, so we add a using statement for it. After that, we just create a new ElementHost, and set its normal WinForms properties. Then we create an instance of the wpf control we want, and add that as the child for the ElementHost. Finally, we add the ElementHost as a child to the current form - and we are all done!

So that is it for using WPF controls inside of Windows Forms. You can download the little sample app from here if you would like to play with the code yourself. 

Source Files:

• WPFInWinForms.zip