An About Visual Basic reader asked for help with this problem where the VB.NET statement ... Process.Start("file:///C:/mainpage.htm#detailpage.htm") ... would only open the mainpage.htm. They wanted to open the detail page instead and nothing they tried would do it. My friend noted that when URI ...

C:/mainpage.htm#detailpage.htm
... by itself was entered into the address field of the browser, everything worked as it should.

(The characters following the "#" in the URI are called a "fragment", also known as a "ref" or a "reference" in the web world.)

Microsoft would probably answer this problem with their dry, catchall response: "The behavior is by design." Out here in the real world where we're trying to use their products, we translate that into, "It's not a bug! It's a feature!"

The Process.Start method is documented here at About Visual Basic in a different article. You can read all about Process.Start by clicking here.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to use Process.Start to open the fragment URI because Process.Start will only pass a "file" in this context. And a fragment is technically not part of a file name. Process.Start actually "cleans up" the file name by deleting any extraneous information before passing it to Windows. That's why it's a "feature"!

You can do what the reader wants ... sort of. The WebBrowser component will accept a URI (not a file) so you can add that component to a VB.NET application and code it this way:

WebBrowser1.Navigate("file:///C:/mainpage.htm#detailpage.htm")
Then it works like a shot. But the web page is contained within the WebBrowser component pane. It doesn't run as an independent process in Windows this way.