Introduction

Most use of the WebBrowser Control is for providing a browser in Visual Basic Applications however Microsoft encourage reusing Web Browser technology not only to provide web-browsing capabilities to applications but also for user-interfaces.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using web-based interfaces in Visual Basic.   These are some advantages:

• Easily add controls on-the-fly
• Integrate formatted text, images, sound and video all controlled from within Visual Basic and only using one control.
• Trap 'mouse enter' and 'mouse out' events without the need for a sub classing timer control.
• Validate user responses within the HTML
• Resize the interface by resizing the WebBrowser control and it will automatically add scrolling where required.
• Allow selective editing of the Interface.
• Allow your users to change the appearance of the interface by simply changing the stylesheet.

I wouldn't suggest changing all interfaces to web-based but there are certainly some instances where they are practical.

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