WindowsForms Rant

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Filed under

WindowsForms

I don't rant very often, but there are a couple things really getting on my nerves so I figured I'd blog about them and see if anybody knows of any workarounds or maybe feels my pain.

<rant>

When setting the Focus of a Control in the Form's Load Event, it DOESN'T WORK! Instead I have to go put it in the Activated Event with a Boolean around it to make sure it only calls it once.
Why is it that if I set the ControlBox Property of a Form to False AND set the FormBorderStyle Property to FixedDialog, I can still double click on the title bar of the form and it maximizes it?
Why is it that if I change the Font of the Form to say....Verdana, the Title Bar's Font doesn't change? BTW, is there some Win32 API I can call to fix that?
Why are there no good and easy to use Wizard Controls out there? ;)

</rant>

*Back to work in WindowsForms I go*

7 Comments

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http:// said
December 11, 2003

Hey Erik- 1- Some quick and easy tests (with textboxes) show that you can call select in the load event rather than focus and you should get what you are looking for. 2- This is a bug, I reckon. You could use the API to prevent it if you want. 3- This is a system wide setting in the Appearance section of the display properties. You probably don't want to change that, though I can see how it's annoying. 4- Because you haven't written one yet. ;-) Jacob
Matt Berther said
December 11, 2003

Erik: I love Tim Dawson's Wzard control. http://www.divil.co.uk/net/controls/wizardcontrol/
HumanCompiler said
December 11, 2003

Thanks Jacob, I totally forgot about using the Select Method as a workaround! Matt...man, how did I miss that? :'( I'll definitely give that a go...thanks! :)
JosephCooney said
December 11, 2003

IIRR Ghengis has stuff for doing wizards too.
Rana said
December 14, 2003

Hi, Your blog contains good info. Keep it up.
Anand said
December 16, 2003

3. Title Bar and other non-client area is with the windows OS and so are system wide settings. This is set in the display settings.
Cory Smith said
December 22, 2003

#3... yes, there is a way to change this. Remember the days (Office 98, I think) of adding a gradient brush to the title bar, same technique. The problem is that this is a system wide setting and therefore you aren't allowed to modify the 'standard' windows border. You can of course depart from the standard border and draw your own from scratch. ;-) Of course, in my oppinion, the result isn't worth the effort involved unless you are really changing the total look of your window.