In the process of writing my first Windows 8 Metro style app using C# and XAML, I came across some limitations of the current WebView control’s implementation. The flow for the feature I was working on is fairly simple:
- Content for a webpage is displayed in a WebView (using the WebView’s Source property).
- User browses the page until they find something they want to save.
- User clicks a save button and the app parses the information into a readable format for saving in the app’s storage.
This is a pretty straightforward concept and I thought the implementation would be just as intuitive. Judging by the similarity of the WebView control to the Silverlight WebBrowser control, I went about implementing this functionality as I would have for Silverlight. I set the WebView’s Source property to the initial Uri where I wanted the browsing to begin. I wired up a test button that I thought would kick off the parsing process. That’s when I started to run into problems.