I just wanted to confirm this:
-First, In order to use 3rd Party WinForm controls/UI, I will need the source not just assembly dll; they’ll first need to be successfully migrated/converted by recompiling with Wisej.Web.Form…
-Second, If project is using unsupported controls e.g. RichTextBox, etc. the conversion will not work…
Hi John,
You can’t use WinForms controls in Wisej. If you have a third party control with the source code it makes it a bit easier to recreate the control using Wisej, but most of the code from the WinForms control cannot be used since it’s most likely based on Win32 SDK (messages, painting, etc.). Wisej control don’t do any drawing and don’t use any Win32 SDK at all. They are all server components that render their UI through JSON properties sent to the client. The client side uses the JSON map to create the corresponding JavaScript widget. C#/VB.NET on the server and JavaScript on the client, communicating using JSON. Doesn’t get cleaner that this. 🙂
If you have a control that is not currently supported and there is no equivalent, you need to build something that can replace it. With Wisej it’s easy, but it still can be a lot of work.
Take the RichTextBox control, for example, it’s easy to extend TextBoxArea and map a good portion of the properties and methods. On the client side you’d have to use an HTML editor and on the server side you’d need an RTF to/from HTML converter. We left this out because it would have been time consuming at this stage with little benefit. We will instead upload two HTML editors to the Extensions page: TinyEditor and TinyMCE. They don’t support RTF but support HTML.
Best,
Luca
