Windows Form as child window of an unmanaged app

Question

I am looking for a way to embed Windows Forms applications written in C# in a C++ windows application. The native application main window is subdivided into several panes. The C# app is supposed to appear within one of those panes, i.e. the root window of the C# component (the outermost form) must be a child window of the main application.

Can this be done? If so, how?

Some additional context: To my knowledge, there are two ways to go about this. First, host the CLR in the native app by using the .net hosting APIs (ICLRRuntimeHost, etc.). Second, host the CLR by putting the windows form in an ActiveX control.

Regarding the first approach, I have managed to get the CLR started up and to load a C# assembly (thanks largely to Mattias Högström). Where I am hitting a road block is that I see no way how to tell the component I am running in the CLR that it needs to be a child of a window passed in from the C++ side.

I have also experimented with the second method (using ActiveX and thanks to Daniel Yanovsky). It almost, but only almost, works for my purposes. I can let arbitrary Windows Forms components run in a child pane of the native app. BUT they always run on the main thread of the main app. This means they use the windows message loop of the main app. MSDN says this will not work reliably since the standard Windows message loops don't meet the requirements of Windows Forms (I wanted to post the link to MSDN here but have already used up my new-user-two-link-allotment).

The exceptions to the message loop issue are, according to MSDN, Internet Explorer and MFC apps. The native app I am using as a host is definitely not Internet Explorer. Also, it uses the windows API as wrapped by wxWidgets so MFC is not (or at least not a welcome) option.

The solutions Microsoft proposes involve letting the C# components run in their own message loops on their own threads. This, at least as far as I can tell, necessarily leads back to the first approach mentioned above. So I am back to the question of getting a Windows Form to work under a passed-in parent window.

Again, I am interested in any input that clarifies the child window issue, independent of the approaches I have mentioned here. But in light of the context I could reduce the general question to two specific questions (and I would need an answer to only one of them):

• Given a Windows Form hosted in an ActiveX control, how can I allow the form to run in its own message loop on its own thread?

or

• Given a Windows Form running in a CLR hosted by a native app, how can I make the form be a child window of a window in the native app?

Answer 1

yes, it can be done. We did the same thing years ago. This is our approach: .NET control also has native window handle, we get these handles through C++/CLI and pass them to Win32, and add these handles as the children of native windows. So the .NET controls run on the main thread of the main app, the problematic part is the message loop, as you have mentioned in your question. We need route the message between the nation and .NET windows if needed. As I remembered, we fixed a lot of bugs related to this, and still there were some mysterious problem we didn't figure out.

There's anothe way: using WPF interop. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742522.aspx . According to MS, this should fix the message problems, but we didn't try this approach. You can just use Win32 to host WPF, then use WPF to host Winform.

So for your last 2 questions:

1. You can't. Only one message loop.
2. Use handle. This article talks about the handle of Windows Forms: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jfoscoding/archive/2004/11/24/269416.aspx