I'm using a hosted axWebBrowser to automate web navigation and data retrieval as part of a Visual Studio 2008 windows forms application written in Visual Basic.

While I appreciate having VB's powerful string manipulation and regular expression features available, addressing the details of website navigation, page layout changes, logon/password security, and browser timing issues in native VB code is driving me nuts.

Can anyone reccommend a 3rd party class library or scripting tool to automate a hosted webBrowser? I have made inquiries regarding commercial products from Newbie Labs and iMacros/iOpus, but have not evaluated either product. Does anyone have feedback on using these tools from a VB.net environment?

Thanks, -BGood

Why not just use the standard Windows.Forms.WebBrowser control? This simplifies much of the work required to embed a webbrowser in a windows forms application, and is included standard in the base libraries.

There is an entire Overview section on MSDN . Internally, WebBrowser uses the same technology as axWebBrowser, but in a much friendlier wrapper. The same functionality is possible , although usually standard operations are just simple when compared to using the axWebBrowser.

---

Reed Copsey, Jr. - http://reedcopsey.com

Why not just use the standard Windows.Forms.WebBrowser control? This simplifies much of the work required to embed a webbrowser in a windows forms application, and is included standard in the base libraries.

There is an entire Overview section on MSDN . Internally, WebBrowser uses the same technology as axWebBrowser, but in a much friendlier wrapper. The same functionality is possible , although usually standard operations are just simple when compared to using the axWebBrowser.

---

Reed Copsey, Jr. - http://reedcopsey.com

Hi Reed,

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm using axWebBrowser because I need to maintain some semblance of state when the hosted browser encounters a newWindow event, such as when the websites I'm browsing popup a new window via javascript. WebBrowser 2.0 opens the new window in a new instance of the default browser (IE), but axWebBrowser handles the new window in the current instance which is managed by my VB application (it's been about a year since I made the decision to switch to axWebBrowser, but as I recall, the deciding factor was in the handling of newWindow2 or navigate2 or something like that). The differences were explored in a previous post:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winforms/thread/9c0bcffe-b057-4a46-97ab-9888073149ca

I'll take a look at the references you provided. Thanks, -BGood