Month: June 2015

Web Browser Control – Specifying the IE Version

Thanks to Rick Strahl for this 🙂

http://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2011/May/21/Web-Browser-Control-Specifying-the-IE-Version

Straight to the point:

Feature Delegation via Registry Hacks

Fortunately starting with Internet Explore 8 and later there’s a fix for this problem via a registry setting. You can specify a registry key to specify which rendering mode and version of IE should be used by that application. These are not global mind you – they have to be enabled for each application individually by writing a registry value for each specific EXE that is hosting the WebBrowser control.

This setting can be made for all users on local machine registry key or per user in the current user key of the registry.

For the Current User:

I’d recommend using the current user setting, as this setting can be made in one place and doesn’t require admin rights to write to the registry. This means you can actually make this change from within your application even if you don’t use an installer or run under an Admin account.

You do have to restart the app to see the change.

The key to write to is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION

Value Key: DWORD  YourApplication.exe

Note that the FeatureControl and FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION keys may not exist at all prior to installation, so you may have to install that whole branch.

For all Users:

There are two different sets of keys for 32 bit and 64 bit applications.

64 bit or 32 bit only machine:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION

Value Key: DWORD – YourApplication.exe

32 bit on 64 bit machine:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION

Value Key: DWORD YourApplication.exe

The value to set this key to is (taken from MSDN here) as decimal values:

11001 (0x2AF9)
Internet Explorer 11. Webpages are displayed in IE11 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive.

11000 (0x2AF8)
Internet Explorer 11. Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE9 mode.

10001 (0x2711)
Internet Explorer 10. Webpages are displayed in IE10 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive.

10000 (0x2710)
Internet Explorer 10. Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE9 mode.

9999 (0x270F)
Internet Explorer 9. Webpages are displayed in IE9 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive.

9000 (0x2328)
Internet Explorer 9. Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE9 mode.

8888 (0x22B8)
Webpages are displayed in IE8 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive.

8000 (0x1F40)
Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE8 mode.

7000 (0x1B58)
Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE7 Standards mode.

The added key looks something like this in the Registry Editor:

RegistryEditorEmulation_2

Note that the 32 bit and 64 bit settings are significant depending on the type of application you are running. If you are running a 32 bit application on a 64 bit machine you need to use the Wow6432Node key to register this setting. If you’re running a 32 bit application on a 32 bit machine, or 64 bit application on a 64 bit application, then the standard registry key should be used.  This means if you’re installing a 32 bit application using an installer you probably will want to set both the Wow64 key and the regular key on the machine.

With this in place my Html Html Help Builder application which has wwhelp.exe as its main executable now works with HTML 5 and CSS 3 documents in the same way that Internet Explorer 9 does.

Incidentally I accidentally added an ‘empty’ DWORD value of 0 to my EXE name and that worked as well giving me IE 9 rendering. Although not documented I suspect 0 (or an invalid value) will default to the installed browser. Don’t have a good way to test this but if somebody could try this with IE 8 installed that would be great:

  • What happens when setting 9000 with IE 8 installed?
  • What happens when setting 0 with IE 8 installed?

Don’t forget to add Keys for Host Environments

If you’re developing your application in Visual Studio and you run the debugger you may find that your application is still not rendering right, but if you run the actual generated EXE from Explorer or the OS command prompt it works. That’s because when you run the debugger in Visual Studio it wraps your application into a debugging host container. For this reason you might want to also add another registry key for yourapp.vshost.exe on your development machine.

If you’re developing in Visual FoxPro make sure you add a key for vfp9.exe to see the rendering adjustments in the Visual FoxPro development environment.

Web Api: enable XML documentation for your subproject (external assembly)

I would admit that this post it’s simply a copy/paste of a stackoverflow response, that was really well done and IMHO should also be in the documentation! of course I up-voted that post 🙂

There is no built-in way to achieve this. However, it requires only a few steps:

  1. Enable XML documentation for your subproject (from project properties / build) like you have for your Web API project. Except this time, route it directly to XmlDocument.xml so that it gets generated in your project’s root folder.
  2. Modify your Web API project’s postbuild event to copy this XML file into your App_Data folder: 
    copy $(SolutionDir)SubProject\XmlDocument.xml $(ProjectDir)\App_Data\Subproject.xml

    Where Subproject.xml should be renamed to whatever your project’s name is plus .xml.

  3. Next open .Areas.HelpPage.HelpPageConfig and locate the following line: 
    config.SetDocumentationProvider(new XmlDocumentationProvider(
    HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/XmlDocument.xml")));

    This is the line you initially uncommented in order to enable XML help documentation in the first place. Replace that line with:

    config.SetDocumentationProvider(new XmlDocumentationProvider(
    HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data")));

    This step ensures that XmlDocumentationProvider is passed the directory that contains your XML files, rather than the specific XML file for your project.

  4. Finally, modify ./Areas/HelpPage/XmlDocumentationProvider in the following ways:
    1. Replace the _documentNavigator field with: 
      private List<XPathNavigator> _documentNavigators = new List<XPathNavigator>();
    2. Replace the constructor with: 
      public XmlDocumentationProvider(string appDataPath)
{
    if (appDataPath == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("appDataPath");
    }

    var files = new[] { "XmlDocument.xml", "Subproject.xml" };
    foreach (var file in files)
    {
        XPathDocument xpath = new XPathDocument(Path.Combine(appDataPath, file));
        _documentNavigators.Add(xpath.CreateNavigator());
    }
}
    3. Add the following method below the constructor: 
      private XPathNavigator SelectSingleNode(string selectExpression)
{
    foreach (var navigator in _documentNavigators)
    {
        var propertyNode = navigator.SelectSingleNode(selectExpression);
        if (propertyNode != null)
            return propertyNode;
    }
    return null;
}
    4. And last, fix all compiler errors (there should be three) resulting in references to _documentNavigator.SelectSingleNode and remove the _documentNavigator. portion so that it now calls the new SelectSingleNode method we defined above.

    This Last step is what modifies the document provider to support looking within multiple XML documents for the help text rather than just the primary project’s.

    Now when you examine your Help documentation, it will include XML documentation from types in your related project.