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Walkthrough: Hosting a Windows Forms Control in WPF

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WPF provides many controls with a rich feature set. However, you may sometimes want to use Windows Forms controls on your WPF pages. For example, you may have a substantial investment in existing Windows Forms controls, or you may have a Windows Forms control that provides unique functionality.

This walkthrough shows you how to host a Windows Forms System.Windows.Forms.MaskedTextBox control on a WPF page by using code.

For a complete code listing of the tasks shown in this walkthrough, see Hosting a Windows Forms Control in WPF Sample.

Prerequisites

You need Visual Studio to complete this walkthrough.

Hosting the Windows Forms Control

To host the MaskedTextBox control

  1. Create a WPF Application project named HostingWfInWpf.

  2. Add references to the following assemblies.

    • WindowsFormsIntegration

    • System.Windows.Forms

  3. Open MainWindow.xaml in the WPF Designer.

  4. Name the Grid element grid1.

    <Grid Name="grid1">
    
</Grid>

  5. In Design view or XAML view, select the Window element.

  6. In the Properties window, click the Events tab.

  7. Double-click the Loaded event.

  8. Insert the following code to handle the Loaded event.

    private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    // Create the interop host control.
    System.Windows.Forms.Integration.WindowsFormsHost host =
        new System.Windows.Forms.Integration.WindowsFormsHost();

    // Create the MaskedTextBox control.
    MaskedTextBox mtbDate = new MaskedTextBox("00/00/0000");

    // Assign the MaskedTextBox control as the host control's child.
    host.Child = mtbDate;

    // Add the interop host control to the Grid
    // control's collection of child controls.
    this.grid1.Children.Add(host);
}

    Private Sub Window_Loaded(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As RoutedEventArgs)
    ' Create the interop host control.
    Dim host As New System.Windows.Forms.Integration.WindowsFormsHost()

    ' Create the MaskedTextBox control.
    Dim mtbDate As New MaskedTextBox("00/00/0000")

    ' Assign the MaskedTextBox control as the host control's child.
    host.Child = mtbDate

    ' Add the interop host control to the Grid
    ' control's collection of child controls.
    Me.grid1.Children.Add(host)

End Sub

  9. At the top of the file, add the following Imports or using statement.

    using System.Windows.Forms;

    Imports System.Windows.Forms

  10. Press F5 to build and run the application.

See also