Sample projects on GitHub

Every feature in this documentation has a runnable project behind it. They live in a public repository: github.com/spicelogic/wpf-html-editor-control-samples, and they are the same projects that ship inside the trial download. Each one is a small WPF application referencing the shipping NuGet package, so there is nothing to wire up and no license key to obtain first - every sample runs on the free trial exactly as it is checked in.

The sample code is MIT licensed, so you can copy any of it straight into your own application. The control itself remains commercial and is installed from NuGet.

What is in the repository

Ten samples, most of them shipping a C# project and a VB.NET twin side by side in a matching -VB folder, both wired into the same solution.

01-Quickstart-CS - the editor filling a window in XAML, starting content through BodyHtml, and a status bar driven by HtmlChanged.
02-MvvmDataBinding-CS - the one most people come for. BodyHtml bound two-way to a view model, and why you call UpdateBindings before reading a bound value.
03-ThemeAndAppearance-CS - border colour and thickness, the document font, and switching EditorMode between the design view and the source view.
04-ToolbarCustomization-CS - hiding built-in buttons, moving editor commands into a toolbar of your own, and adding buttons that act on the document.
05-MailMergeTemplate-CS - registering merge fields, the built-in placeholder toolbar, and previewing a template with a record substituted in.
06-Localization-CS - switching the editor UI language at runtime, an independent spell-check dictionary language, and a JSON file for overriding individual strings.
07-CustomSpellChecker-CS - plugging your own spell-check engine in behind the editor's inline checking.
08-CustomDialog-CS - replacing every built-in dialog (image, hyperlink, table, symbol, search, spell check, style builder, colour picker) with your own WPF windows, so the editor carries your branding.
09-CustomContextMenu-CS - replacing the right-click menu with your own commands.
10-FullEditorDemo-CS - the wider tour: the full toolbar, rich starting content, and live spell checking with a language picker.

The gotcha the binding sample is built around

The editor hosts a live document rather than a plain string, so a bound view model property reflects whatever the binding last pushed into it. If you read that property from code which runs without the editor losing focus first - a keyboard shortcut, a background timer, a button that does not move focus - the view model is a moment behind the user's last keystrokes. Call UpdateBindings before reading, and the current content is pushed into the dependency properties first. This is the single most common support question about the control, which is why sample 02 is built entirely around it.

Which .NET version you need

Use whichever target framework your application already uses. The NuGet package ships binaries for .NET Framework 4.5, 4.7.2 and 4.8, plus .NET 5 through .NET 10 on Windows.

The sample projects intentionally target net48 by default. This provides broad out-of-the-box Visual Studio compatibility and avoids requiring the latest .NET SDK merely to open and build a sample. It does not limit the control or sample code to .NET Framework 4.8.

To use another supported target, change the Target framework from the project's Application property page in Visual Studio. To retarget every sample at once, change the single shared setting in Directory.Build.props at the repository root:

<TargetFramework>net48</TargetFramework>

For example, change it to net10.0-windows to build the samples on .NET 10. NuGet automatically selects the matching package asset for the framework you choose.

Every sample is verified building on net45, net472, net48, net8.0-windows and net10.0-windows. The sample code already includes the small framework-specific adjustments it needs, so retargeting does not require manual source edits.

Running the samples

You need Windows and the SDK matching whichever target you build against.

git clone https://github.com/spicelogic/wpf-html-editor-control-samples.git cd wpf-html-editor-control-samples dotnet build WpfHtmlEditorSamples.sln dotnet run --project 01-Quickstart-CS

You can also open WpfHtmlEditorSamples.sln in Visual Studio and set any project as the startup project.

Building on Windows Forms as well

The WinForms edition has its own sample repository covering Word paste cleanup, data binding, custom dialogs and mail merge: github.com/spicelogic/winforms-html-editor-control-samples. See the WinForms HTML Editor control for the product itself.