Walkthrough: Hosting a Windows Forms Control in WPF

Article
2013-02-04

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 the following components to complete this walkthrough:

Visual Studio 2010.

Hosting the Windows Forms Control

To host the MaskedTextBox control

Create a WPF Application project named HostingWfInWpf.
Add references to the following assemblies.
- WindowsFormsIntegration
- System.Windows.Forms
Open MainWindow.xaml in the WPF Designer.
Name the Grid element grid1.
```
<Grid Name="grid1">

</Grid>
```
In Design view or XAML view, select the Window element.
In the Properties window, click the Events tab.
Double-click the Loaded event.

Insert the following code to handle the Loaded event.

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

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);
}

At the top of the file, add the following Imports or using statement.
```
Imports System.Windows.Forms
```
```
using System.Windows.Forms;
```
Press F5 to build and run the application.

Share via

Walkthrough: Hosting a Windows Forms Control in WPF

Prerequisites

Hosting the Windows Forms Control

To host the MaskedTextBox control

See Also

Tasks

Reference

Concepts

Other Resources

Additional resources