Introduction
In one of our last articles the author described how to embed WinForms-Controls into WPF. This one explains the other way around: how can one integrate a WPF-UserControl into WinForms. In the example, a scaleable WPF-image is hosted in a WinForms-Dialog.
The Concept
For hosting a WPF-Usercontrol in WinForms you can use the control ElementHost
that resides in the namespace System.Windows.Forms.Integration
. This control has a property called Child to which you can assign an instance of an UIElement
.
The Project
Here is the XAML for our ScaleableImageControl
. It is very simple, just an image with a BitmapEffect
:
<UserControl x:Class="ScaleableImageControl.ScaleableImageCtrl"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Height="300" Width="300">
<Image Margin="10" x:Name="img" Stretch="Uniform" Opacity="1">
<Image.BitmapEffect>
<DropShadowBitmapEffect Opacity="1" />
</Image.BitmapEffect>
</Image>
</UserControl>
Now, we add two methods to the Usercontrol that we will call from the Windows Forms dialog:
public void SetSource(string fileName)
{
img.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri(fileName));
}
public void SetOpacity(double opacity)
{
img.Opacity = opacity;
}
We are able to set the opacity and the displayed image with this interface.
Hosting the WPF-control in WinForms
When opening the Winforms dialog in the designer of VS 2008 you will realize that there is a ScaleableImageControl in the toolbox:
You can drag it into your Winforms dialog. An ElementHost-instance and a ScaleableImageControl-instance is created for you, the ScaleableImageControl-object is assigned to the Child-property of the ElementHost-object. VS 2008 helps us a lot here. At last we need some controls to interact we the ScaleableImageControl-object (assigning images and setting the opacity):
Here is the code for interaction:
private void udOpacity_ValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
scaleableImageCtrl1.SetOpacity( (double) udOpacity.Value);
}
private void btnBrowse_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (openFileDialog1.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
{
try
{
scaleableImageCtrl1.SetSource(openFileDialog1.FileName);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
}
}
}
It is not a big deal to integrate WPF in Winforms. Try it, the project is attached. Have fun!