Changed behavior of hosted WebBrowser controls

Question

I have a desktop application (C++ using the plain Windows C-API) that includes a WebBrowser control used to display web content (URLs) and occasionally .EML files (email messages).

The aforementioned application works correctly in Windows 7 and earlier, but when tested in Windows 8 Release Preview, web content is displayed correctly as before, but the .EML files are shown as plain text (even including headers) instead of proper formatting as before.

Clearly, the behavior of these controls in Windows 8, breaks with previous tradition, so I guess that all applications that use this type of control, will suffer the same problem.

Question: is it possible to make these controls work like in previous versions on this kind of files?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

.EML is an ASCII plain text file format. Seems you should do the parse action in your application for this .eml format to read the mail content part (e.g. HTML text). I tested it in Windows 8, yes, the WebBrowser does not parse the mail, and prompt to select one program to open this file type in default.

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Bob Bao [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Bob: 

Really almost all Web format are ultimately plain text. Of course, I can use the workaround that you mention, but my underlying complain is that Microsoft has broken the compatibility with its most recent Windows 7 version (and earlier) so, by now, my response to all my customers is no, do not change to Windows 8.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, now the WebBrowser cannot view the EML inside, you could share your feedback on the Visual Studio UserVoice , and I will try to share this feedback internally.

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Bob Bao [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us