Question

I want to use Awesomium as an embedded web browser in my WPF app.

I’ve tried installing the latest Awesomium SDK (1.6.3b), and two versions back (1.6.2 and 1.6.1). All fail on my Windows 7 64bit machine with a nasty error, like so:

[SEH_GENERIC] ARRAY_BOUNDS_EXCEEDED (0xc000008c) at address [0x757ab9bc]

    *** Stack Trace (x86) ***

[0x757ab9bc]  RaiseException()
[0x00b1983e]  -----
[0x00b1435a]  -----
[0x00b134cc]  -----
[0x00af5650]  -----
[0x77a60a52]  RtlCreateHeap()
[0x77a5b375]  RtlFormatCurrentUserKeyPath()
[0x77a53c74]  RtlImageNtHeader()
[0x49564441]  -----
[0x5354534e]  -----

Repeated email and web queries to the company and the founder (Adam Simmons) about site licensing and the installation problem have gone un-answered.

My questions are:

1. Is there a workaround to the above error, so that I can at least try out the SDK?
2. Awesomium seems the de-facto standard for embedding a “good” web browser in a WPF app. However, installation issues and the lack of response from the team are cause for concern in using this product. What is people’s experience with this?
3. Is there a viable alternative that is not embedded IE?

Answer 1

I have tried awesomium for an xna application lately and the installation went without problems, so i cant tell anything about your first question.

To Question 2: Sometimes the developers answer quite quickly, but i experienced that issues concerning critical oder more complex thematics are often ignored.

To Question 3: There are (at least) two other frameworks worth looking at

• http://berkelium.org/ Berkelium is a BSD licensed library that provides off-screen browser rendering via Google’s open source Chromium web browser.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/webkitdotnet/: WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.