Winforms in Unity?

I am making a Windows application that needs to combine both traditional Winforms and Unity 3D rendering. It is not a game, but a 3D tool.

So far I have been approaching the problem by making two separate applications. One using standard Winforms in Visual Studio, and one using Unity. Then these two communicate using sockets.

It works, but, it is a very clumsy approach.

Another approach, that seems far better, is to use Winforms from within Unity itself. I found some old tutorials that basically tells you to copy System.Windows.Forms.dll to your Unity asset folder, turn on full Net2.0 API support and then go ahead.

However, even the simplest test, like the one below, causes a crash and an exception (ArgumentException: GCHandle value cannot be zero)

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Windows.Forms;
3.  
4. public class TestForms : MonoBehaviour {
5.     void Start () {
6.         Form f = new Form();
7.         f.ShowDialog();  //Works, shows the form, but causes a crash
8.     }
9. }
10.  

I read somewhere that Mono no longer supports Winforms, is that true? What would be the best approach now?

 

Why do you need win forms?? you can create whatever components there using unity UI and make the whole thing a single Unity project.

 

Using a custom UI gives a bad user experience.

 

I have done this but with a WPF application that integrates a 3D viewer developed in Unity that communicates with WPF via .NET remoting, so it's possible.

 

Why do you ask?? It should be perfectly obvious that it is better to use the systems own UI than something you hack together yourself, which the user is not familiar with. This is not amateur hour, and naturally there are loads of uses for Unity outside the realm of games.