How NOT to start an application without showing a form =)

The notify icon article started out because I realized, even internally that the best practice for this wasn't very obvious. I thought I'd share the "other" solutions to the problem, and their pitfalls. ;-)

Approach 1: Start off with Form.Opacity = 0, then when ready to show, change Form.Opacity = 1
Pitfall: Form resize may be significantly slower, as playing with the opacity property can turn off hardware acceleration.

Approach 2: Start with ShowInTaskbar = false, WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized, when ready to show toggle both these properties.
Pitfall: Ugly flicker of the form, as toggling the ShowInTaskbar property after the handle has been created actually destroys the form and recreates it in place (calls RecreateHandle).

Approach 3: Change StartPosition to FormStartPosition.Manual, place it offscreen.
Pitfall: This approach is the most reasonable of the three; it is just very easy to get this one incorrect by not taking into account multiple monitors, scaling, etc.

How do you actually do this? Use ApplicationContext.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 18, 2005
  Hello, thanks for nice articles. Could you please write one about creating combobox-style controls using WinForms? I mean control with a popup element, which is hidden when user clicks (or tabs, alt-tabs, win-button, hit global shortcut which activates something)somewhere outside it, like combo drop-down, popup menu and such. I've spent a lot of time trying to mimic this behavior including various WinAPI calls, hooks, modal loops, etc, but can't get it work just right.