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Leverage the power of HTML in your Windows forms
Implementing rich content such as graphics, fonts, colors and buttons in your Windows dialogs and forms is always quite a bit of effort - even with .NET or Visual Basic. There are many issues with placement, resizing and a range of other messy problems. Wouldn't it be great if you could use HTML instead? Embedding webbrowser controls in webpages is a growing trend these days. These screenshots are from Microsoft .NET Visual Studio. Microsoft and others are making heavy use of embedded webbrowser controls in their user interfaces these days. And for good reason: Look at the results you get with just using HTML.

And with our HSP product, you can run standard ASP webpages from within your application to generate HTML dynamically for display in your embedded WOW controls, so you can achieve great looking UIs, like the "Recently Opened Files" list screenshot at left. And using HSP, you can store all of your HTML content in a single EzStor file.

Think about generating HTML to display your relational database data and using hyperlinks to provide easy hyperlinking between related records (eg. Customers to Orders). The possibilities are endless.

Its no secret that you can embed webbrowser controls in your Windows programs. But one big problem with the plain webbrowser control is that you won't be able to receive mouse click events in your application code from your webpages. Without this capablility, your program won't be able to interact with the the webbrowser control via events. No worries though, our WOW ActiveX control does do this. All you have to do is put a bit of JavaScript or VBScript in your webpage and you can pass any HTML event through to your VB, Delphi, .NET or C++ app as a COM Event. So you can have HTML elements on your webpages which activate application functions that are outside the scope of the webbrowser. For example, you could have a button on a webpage that, when clicked, activates a new application form.

Besides events, you will want to have control over the context menu, accelerator keys, border and appearance of the webbrowser control. These are things you cannot do with the raw webbrowser control. Go ahead an try dropping a webbrowser on a VB Form and load a webpage into it. You will immediately notice the 3-D border (you must load a webpage to see it). You cannot get rid of that border. Now right-click on the webpage and see the context menu. You cannot disable that menu. WOW has all of these problems solved for you in an easy to use interface. And you get all of the webbrowser events through the WOW events interface.

Using WOW you can display rich HTML content right in your applications and receive mouse click and other HTML events back in your VB or C++ code, allowing you to activate other parts of your VB or C++ program that are outside the scope of the IE browser control, such as other forms and dialog windows. With these tools, the possibilities are limitless.

You can even add the Flash player or any other ActiveX controls to your webpages. Furthermore, the webpages for your app can be changed without recompiling your program. Now this can be quite handy, because you can change the appearance of your program without recompiling - just change the webpage.

One of the coolest things about embedded webbrowser controls is that it handles relative links exactly the same as a normal webbrowser does. So you can maintain a directory structure to organize your content. For example, you can have all of your graphics content in a subfolder named "graphics". Your IMG tag would reference a file with the SRC attribute like this: SRC="graphics/mypicture.jpg".

Having a webbrowser control in your app opens a whole range of new possibilities. If you wanted to, you could seamlessly navigate from an HTML page on your local disk to a page on the Internet. The possibilities around this flexibility are endless. And when you combine WOW with HTML Scripting Pages that are themselves able to execute code, you have the ultimate ActiveX control.

Your license allows you to use these controls in your private, shareware, freeware or commercial applications royalty-free. A single developer "machine license" is used to produce unlimited copies of your application. A "machine license" means that the license key only works on a single developer PC. You may not use this product as part of another programming tool or component without written permission from EzTools Software.

Our license key is tied to the network card if it has one, or the hard disk serial number if not. Changing to a new computer will require a new license key if it does not use the same netcard. A hard disk/OS upgrade will only require a new key if the PC doesn't have a netcard (or the netcard ID could not be obtained programmatically), because the hard disk serial number gets re-generated.

This control is contained in eztoolslib.dll (and wowctl2.dll or wowctl.net.dll if you are using the WOW-only DLL). This file is installed to your Windows/System32 folder by the setup program. You need to package this file with your own file set, and it must be registered on the target machine (using regsvr32.exe).

You can use the EzStor program to store all of your webpage content in a single storage file where end-users can't meddle with it. Our HSP pluggable protocol reads the files seamlessly from these files, offering you a great solution for packaging your HTML content files for distribution (HSP is in a single, lightweight DLL named hsppp.dll). This webpage and all of its content is stored this way - in the file named EzToolsLib.ezs. You can store graphics, ASP or even Javascript files in an EzStor file. Additionally, the content is compressed and encrypted in a proprietary format so you can be confident your files are secure. EzStor and WOW work together to form a complete, elegant programming solution.

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