Problems with Prism hosted in a WinForm ElementHost

Question

I am having problems with hosting a WPF prism app in an ElementHost control and am desparate for help.

The PRISM app runs fine in silverlight and in a standalone WPF.

The main Shell seems to setup fine in the elementHost on a WinForm however other views only load with the “RegisterViewWithRegion” and not the “Add,Activate” procedure. I need “Add,Activate” for scoping. However I beleive the problem is that I am loading my shell twice … not on purpose. I cannot find a way to call the bootsrapper and set the elementHot without calling “Resolve” twice.

Here is the code for my WinForm and my bootstrapper. Again everything works when using "RegisterViewWithRegion".

Here is the Winform Constructor:

   public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        if (System.Windows.Application.Current == null)  
        {
            new MyApp();
        }

        Bootstrapper bootStrapper = new Bootstrapper();
        bootStrapper.Run();

        var shellElement = bootStrapper.Container.Resolve<ShellContainer>();

        //Attach the WPF control to the host  
        elementHost.Child = shellElement;
    }

Here is the bootstrapper:

public class Bootstrapper : UnityBootstrapper
{
    protected override DependencyObject CreateShell()
    {
        return Container.Resolve<ShellContainer>();
    }

    protected override void InitializeModules()
    {
        IModule moduleSurvey = Container.Resolve<SurveyModule>();
        moduleSurvey.Initialize();

    }
}

Also I wanted to mention that it's not necessary to initialize the modules yourself. You should override the GetModuleCatalog, rather than initialize the modules yourself. You'll be taking over a little less of the responsibility of the UnityBootsrapper this way. Most people override InitializeModules just to put in a little logic that needs to fire before the modules need to Initialize and they call base.InitializeModules() after they are finished. — Anderson Imes
– Anderson Imes, Commented Dec 21, 2009 at 14:38
You can see here the actual code for the InitializeModules in the base bootstrapper is doing some interesting things that you are completely overriding: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd490820.aspx The section right below the code for the InitializeModules method shows how to return a module catalog :) — Anderson Imes
– Anderson Imes, Commented Dec 21, 2009 at 14:39

Anderson Imes · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-21 14:33:21Z

0

The Bootstrapper automatically sets Application.Current.MainForm to whatever you returned in the CreateShell method. Hopefully you are setting up an Application (I think that's what you are doing in the first If block). If so, you can just change this:

var shellElement = bootStrapper.Container.Resolve<ShellContainer>();

To this:

var shellElement = Application.Current.MainForm;

That ought to work, but there are definitely some weirdnesses with the ElementHost. We ended up with a lot of strange rendering bugs, especially in a Citrix environment. I don't know if this is a limitation of your setup, but I thought I would mention it.

Good luck!

answered Dec 21, 2009 at 14:33

Anderson Imes

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Mark Lindell · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-13 12:48:07Z

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I had the same GCE (Gross Conceptual Error). I was seeing the same behavior of my views being instantiated twice when using Add or Activate. I was deep into debugging the behaviors when it hit me.

The following is returning a new instance of the ShellContainer.

var shellElement = bootStrapper.Container.Resolve<ShellContainer>();

Either register your ShellContainer type in the container with a ContainerControlledLifetimeManager or put a prublic property on your bootstrapper to access the ShellContainer instance to set into your ElementHost.

answered Jul 13, 2010 at 12:48

Mark Lindell

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