Creating the looks and feel of a Windows form.

Question

I'm working on an ASP.NET and someone asked me how much time it would cost to make the site.master appear like a Windows form. Basically, it should have a caption, an icon on the left, a minimize/maximize/close button on the right and preferably these should function similar to a real form. Also, it needs to have borders which can behave similar to a real form. (Thus, in some cases people could just resize them.)

(We're only supporting Internet Explorer 6 and higher and it's for an IntraNet application.)

My answer was: why would we ever want to have something like that inside a web browser? So he went away.

But I can't get it out of my head and it would look real cool to have a winform-like thing inside the website. So, just asking... Has anyone ever done such a thing and is willing to share his code?

Answer 1

It is certainly possible to host user defined winforms controls in a browser (although I've only done it on a training course). Take a look here

Answer 2

I think this will meet your needs:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/winforms2webforms.aspx

This will use only html. Hence one WILL NOT get all the features available in WinForms.

Answer 3

Take a look at Visual WebGUI.

I used it a while back to bring an existing WinForms application to the web and it was surprisingly effective -- you just switch namespaces and, with only a few changes here and there, you get a running ASP.NET site.