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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T14:21:36+00:00

I want to display data on a Windows Forms project in C#. The general

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I want to display data on a Windows Forms project in C#.

The general sketch for the GUI is similar to Acrobat Reader or MS Word – meaning i want to display the data on several pages, and let the user navigate between the pages. The data i`m displaying isn’t special, i just want to give the user a “page” feeling when viewing it.

I`m searching for a good starting point, preferably open-source.

I thought about using some kind of a reporting tool, such as Crystal Reports, is that a good idea?

Also, is better to use WPF then WinForms for this?

Any thought and recommendations are welcome.

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If this project is just for fun, and if you already are using Visual Studio 2008, then WPF is a good choice for this.

    If you intend to make this a commercial project, however, I would recommend making it a WinForms application. WPF requires Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5. Many Windows users (especially corporate customers) are still using .Net 2.0 and don’t plan to upgrade soon. Some are even still on .Net 1.1 (or no .Net at all). .Net 2.0 comes pre-installed now on new PCs, and the installer for 2.0 is only 23 MB (versus close to 200 MB for the somewhat-buggy .Net 3.5 installer). Also, .Net apps can (potentially) be made to run on Mac, Linux and the iPhone thanks to Mono, but Mono now is somewhere between .Net 2.0 and .Net 3.5, so WPF applications can’t be cross-platform yet.

    Here is a previous answer to a sort-of-similar question about doing a zoom effect in .Net with GDI+:

    Auto sizing zoom on an image in .NET

    This should give you a start on doing this kind of graphics work in .Net (and it’s as open source as it gets).

    Update: If you want to render XPS documents (easily), then you should use WPF. However, this choice would effectively eliminate the possibility of making your application cross-platform via Mono, at least in the short-term.

    An alternative would be to export your documents as PDF files, or use Adobe Acrobat to convert your XPS documents into PDF files. Here is a link to a CodeProject sample that renders PDFs entirely in C#/.Net 2.0 or older:

    http://www.codeproject.com/KB/showcase/pdfrasterizer.aspx

    This code would allow your WinForms application to render a PDF file as a collection of Bitmaps (one for each page), and from there it’s a relatively simple matter to display these Bitmaps in the manner you describe (with zoom and everything). Because the project would use .Net 2.0, it should work in Mono without any modifications.

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