Working With Web Browser Control in Windows Phone 7

Introduction

In this article we are going to see how to use Web Browser control in Windows phone 7 development. Web Browser control in windows phone 7 is used to access a static content or a web based content based on the development need. We can use a number of ways to use this control in our windows phone 7 development like we can use to dynamically generate a HTML code and display as a page or we can use to show a static page saved in a Isolated Storage or to save the page to an isolated storage. Let us jump start to see the step by step process on how to make use of the Windows Phone 7 Web Browser control.

Steps

Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 application with a valid project name as shown in the screen below.

Now we can see the Windows Phone 7 designer and XAML windows where we can start designing our application. Let us start with directly drag and drop the Web Browser control from the Visual Studio Tool Box and re-size it as shown in the screen below.

XAML Code

<!--TitlePanel contains the name of the application and page title-->
<StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,17,0,28">
    <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="F5DEBUG WP7 TUTORIALS" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
    <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="Web Browser" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
</StackPanel> 
<!--ContentPanel - place additional content here-->
<Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
    <phone:WebBrowser HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="9,121,0,0" Name="webBrowser1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="475" Width="441" />
    <TextBox Height="72" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="-4,22,0,0" Name="textBox1" Text="TextBox" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="380" />
    <Button Content="Go" Height="72" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="371,22,0,0" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="85" />
</Grid>

Now let us add our code behind to access a web site by providing the URL. We need to use the Source property of the Web Browser Control to assign the URI to navigate on clicking of the button also we have an alternative approach of using the Navigate(URI) property to do the same task as shown in the screen below.

Code Behind

private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
string strURI = textBox1.Text.ToString();
webBrowser1.Source = new Uri(strURI, UriKind.Absolute);
//webBrowser1.Navigate(new Uri(strURI, UriKind.Absolute));
}

 

Now let us run the application to check the output in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator, just press F5 to build and execute the project and we can see the result as shown in the screen below.

Now let us see how we can create a dynamic html and map it to the web browser control to load the html content as a static page. First let us add a new page and add the webbrowser control to that as we did in our above steps. Once we added the control to load the html we can see the screen looks like below.

XAML Code

<StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,17,0,28">
    <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="F5DEBUG WP7 TUTORIALS" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
    <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="Web Browser" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
</StackPanel>
<!--ContentPanel - place additional content here-->
<Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
    <phone:WebBrowser HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="9,6,0,0" Name="webBrowser1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="441" Height="595" />
</Grid>

Now let us add the code to load the HTML content using the WebBrowser_onloaded event as shown in the below code. The code will take the static html content and load it to the web browser control. Add the below code to the code behind of the page to load any static HTML page as per the requirement.

Code Behind

public WebBrowserPage2()
{
InitializeComponent();
webBrowser1.Loaded += WebBrowser_OnLoaded;
}
private void WebBrowser_OnLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
webBrowser1.NavigateToString("<html><head><meta name='viewport' content='width=480, user-scalable=yes' /></head><body><h2>Welcome to F5debug!
</h2><p>To get more updates visit www.f5Debug.net</p></body></html>");
} 

Now let us run the application and we can see the WebBrowser control load the static html content. To build and execute the application press F5 and we can see the output in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator as shown in the screen below.

Conclusion

So in this article we have seen how to use the Web Browser control works with Windows Phone 7 application development.