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Before moving ahead with the MSHTML hosting posts, I wanted to take a moment to talk about alternatives to WebBrowser. I am sure you are familiar with the Mozilla webbrowser. Started as an open source project by Netscape, Mozilla and its suite of companion projects are quite an achievement. One of the Mozilla projects is an ActiveX wrapper around the rendering engine which conforms to the IWebBrowser2 and DWebBrowserEvents2 COM interfaces. Created and maintained by Adam Lock the project has come along way. There is even minimal support for the IHTMLDocument DOM interfaces.

My last posts have dealt with using the WebBrowser component to display HTML pages inside your application. We have seen how it does not take much to embed the control to create your own little mini-webbrowser. In this post I want to go a little further than building a webbrowser. Lots of applications are using a web-like UI. Applications like Intuit Quicken, Microsoft Outlook and Money actually use the WebBrowser control to achieve their web-like UI’s. Microsoft Office task panes and other inductive UI’s can be developed using the WebBrowser control.

On the surface it seems like a great deal. You can actually embed MSHTML, the IE HTML rendering engine, in your own application. There is a lot of cool, simple features you get out-of-the-box. As soon as you get more advanced in your features, you find things are not so simple.

Hosting IE in your application is a relatively straight forward process, provided your development environment supports the use of ActiveX controls. Each language/framework has its own way of doing it: VB works directly with the WebBrowser control, MFC has its CHtmlView wrapper classes, Delphi has the TWebBrowser wrapper and C++Builder uses TCppWebBrowser. Create one of these somewhere in your application and your on your way to displaying HTML pages.

I am a big proponent of the staged delivery concept of software development. McConnell’s treatment really brought it home for me when I first read Software Survival Guide. The recent Agile methods also preach the same ideas. It’s just good sense: Always have a buildable, releasable product.

Microsoft published the first article of a two-part series on Inductive UI (IUI) design, their buzzword for Task-based UI. This one covers a couple things:

I finally have a reason to try to implement P2P in a development project. I have used TCP sockets on several occasions and I have played around with UDP broadcasts as well. What I am trying to do with P2P needs to be more reliable than the UDP broadcasts.