In the next 2 minutes, let me demonstrate how we can build a WinForms application and run it in our browser.

The first thing we need to do is install Visual WebGui and get all the functionality that is demonstrated in this post. You should register on the Visual WebGui site (http://www.visualwebgui.com) and then download and install the Visual WebGui development framework.

After we install the framework we are ready to start a new project.

Let's open a new Visual WebGui project:

The new project will include all the required files as displayed in our project's Solution Explorer.

As you can see, we are going to write a web application with WinForms inside a Web Application.

We'll open the form designer by double clicking on Form1.cs in the Solution Explorer

The Visual WebGui designer, which appears below, has the same look and feel as the WinForms designer.

We can resize our form to maximize our work area. We can do that by changing the Form Size property or resizing the form using the mouse, just like normal WinForms behavior.

After our form is resized, we can add a control or two by using "drag and drop" to put toolbox controls on our form.

We can look at the control properties and change the label's text.

Now we'll add a Button control and change its properties as well.

After we're done designing our (very control rich) form, we'll go and write some code by double clicking the "Write Hello World" button.

Now we are ready to write our code, let's set the label's text to "Hello World".

After we completed our WinForms designing and written some code-behind we can finally run our sample.

Now we'll click on the "Write Hello World" button and see if our code works.

Woo! We've clicked the WinForms button inside our browser and the WinForms label has changed without a single PostBack!

Does this work in FireFox?

Well, Visual WebGui supports the major browsers as you can see in the following image.

About Marissa Levy

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