HTML Editor in a Windows Forms Application

c# .net vb.net winforms controls
John picture John · Aug 12, 2008 · Viewed 36.6k times · Source

We are looking for a WYSIWYG editor control for our windows application (vb.net or c#) so that users can design HTML emails (to send using the SMTP objects in the dot net framework) before sending.

Currently all the available editors we can find have one of the following issues:

  1. They rely on mshtml.dll or the web browser control which as proven for us to be unreliable as the HTML code and the editor get out of sync under windows 2000 (IE6)

  2. They are web-based, not a windows form control

  3. They place styles in the head of the document (see note below)

Unfortunately, as this HTML email article descries the only sure way of making HTML emails to work with styles is to use them inline which now seems to be unsupported in many editors.

Does anyone have any experience in this or could suggest a solution?

Answer

J Wynia picture J Wynia · Aug 12, 2008

I've been using this one, which goes a little lower than the WebBrowser, but still uses MSHTML, which does spit out some ugly HTML. For my purposes, I am doing a multi-tabbed editor with WYSIWYG and HTML edit mode (using ICSharp.TextEditor) with a Buffer class to update whenever tabs change. As part of that Buffer class, I actually run the HTML through HTML Tidy and a few scrub-n-replace bits to get valid XHTML.

I only offer that as a solution because I, too, failed to find one that wasn't derived from MSHTML in some way and eventually just went ahead with the above solution to keep moving forward.

Related questions

How to get ALL child controls of a Windows Forms form of a specific type (Button/Textbox)?

I need to get all controls on a form that are of type x. I'm pretty sure I saw that code once in the past that used something like this: dim ctrls() as Control ctrls = Me.Controls(GetType(TextBox)) I …

Read More
Set default format of datetimepicker as dd-MM-yyyy

I have a datetimepicker which on loading of windows form shows me format in 'MM-dd-yyyy', as follows: I would like it in dd-MM-yyyy. I tried the following: set custom format: "dd-MM-yyyy" But Its not changing. What could be the problem? …

Read More
center MessageBox in parent form

Is there a easy way to center MessageBox in parent form in .net 2.0

Read More