Monday, September 29, 2014

Code Project: Simple Browser (C# and Windows Forms)


Please click HERE to access this project solution file from GitHub.

The Simple Browser allows you to go to any webpage (its basically a small IE) by pressing ">" for Go or by typing in a web address and hitting enter. I blocked off the ability to re-size as I meant it as an addition for an application, but this is one property easily changed.

    If you open up the .cs Designer, go to View --> Properties, then dropdown until you are on "Form1" properties.. the only ones I changed from default are the following:
  • FormBorderStyle: this limits the ability of the user to resize the window.
  • AcceptButton: this allows the user to type text into URL text box and hit "enter" to cause it to go to the page. The accept button is mapped to "button1" which is the name of the button next to the URL box I made.
The entire browser is easily modifiable. The best uses I can think of are the following: a HTML help webpage that can be directly loaded upon open (for a windows application), as a lightweight browser within a console (think PlayStation ability to browse the web), or if you wanted to allow someone to only use one site for academic testing purposes.. (you could remove the textbox to enter a URL) .. say for Prometric exam centers, schools, universities, or other testing centers. During my time in medical school all of our exams were online where we could navigate but not resize the window or minimize the window (obviously you don't want your physician cheating on their exams?).


Windows forms are very basic and simple to use! Not much going on, only thing is a button connection. The rest is done in the form preset properties.