Why is all of the text on my window blank? - c#

Sorry for asking such a basic question, but I just can't figure it out. I'm trying to display a status window that just says "Uninstalling prior versions" while the program runs so the user has some idea what's going on. So I created a C# form, added a label and do a window.show(). Here's what the form looks like in design mode:
And yet here's what displays:
I added a second label and a button to make sure that the text of my label wasn't some odd color or something that was causing the problem and they don't appear either.
What's going on here? This should be so simple. I've done this hundreds of times and never seen this behavior.

TaW said in this comment:
You can call Refresh() before starting the long-running work.
Refresh() was just what I needed!

Related

limiting tabbing to a custom in-window message box

I have made a custom MessageBox for my application and it launches as a UserControl. I have two buttons inside it and I would like to allow users to press Tab to switch between Buttons. However, since it's a UserControl overlaying the content, Pressing tab more than twice makes the focus go in the background on elements that aren't supposed to be tabbed at.
I can't figure out a good idea how to prevent this, I've thought of making a method that will select all elements and make their IsTabStop values to false and then restore them later, but I think that would be more of a problem then a solution.
Is there a way around this to limit tabbing only to the UserControl?
I would also appreciate advice on working with the message box.. the whole messagebox is an async function that has an infinitive loop until the answer is given. Is there another way to stop the application until one of the message box options was selected?
Crowcoder's reference has lead to correct MSDN page where I found my solution:
dialog = new UCMessageBox("Are you sure you want to exit the application?", MBType.YesNo);
AppMessageBox.Children.Add(dialog);
KeyboardNavigation.SetTabNavigation(dialog, KeyboardNavigationMode.Cycle);
The key was to call .SetTabNavigation function and direct it to my dialog (custom UserControl for the message box) and setting the KeyboardNavigationMode to Cycle.
After closing the UC rest of the application continued normally regarding navigation.

Why is this WinForm in execution so different from its design?

I have a simple WinForm whose only function is to display a message passed to it. The message is passed as a string and is displayed in a textbox. It is set to be a FixedToolWindow (and no matter how else I set it I get the same behavior in the end).
The form is called with:
PswCoordFailDisplay coord1 = new PswCoordFailDisplay(inputString);
coord1.Show();
Here are two screenshots: top is of the designer; bottom is how it is actually painted.
This is part of a fairly complicated application with about 10 other WinForms. They all act like they're supposed to, except this one.
The changes from design are:
the Form's dimensions change
the textbox changes to occupy the entire width of the form (possibly in response to the size of the text that fills it -- although ScrollBars is set to Both)
the Close button changes its text to "OK" and migrates to the bottom right
the form's Title is gone
the X-closer is different
when I turn ControlBox to False, the X-closer appears regardless, and in the same form as in the bottom example
I pretty much take all the defaults that a WinForm provides when creating the WinForm, except for a couple of items that shouldn't make this kind of difference.
What on earth is happening? I mean, it still works fine, but it's not what the design calls for!
If you pay close attention to the pictured screenshots presented in the question, you will notice that the bottom one shows a MessageBox, not the intended WinForm. As commenters T McKeown and Grant Winney pointed out, there is no way for the elements of the form to go that far off the rails unless the form was coded that way. Since it wasn't coded that way, the expected form is NOT being called. There is a very superficial resemblance, of course, which accounted for my confusion.
If I had showed the complete calling code, a sharp eye would have seen this quickly:
switch (opRes.OpResult)
{
case OperationResult.Result.Succeeded :
MessageBox.Show("Password coordination succeeded.");
LoadUser();
break;
case OperationResult.Result.PartialSuccess :
MessageBox.Show(String.Format("Password coordination partially succeeded: {0}{1}", Environment.NewLine, opRes.Notation));
LoadUser();
break;
default :
MessageBox.Show("Password coordination failed.");
PswCoordFailDisplay coord1 = new PswCoordFailDisplay(opRes.Notation);
coord1.Show();
break;
}
As you can clearly see, with a "partial success" control would be passed to the second case in the switch statement, not the default. The second case was supposed to be coded with the new WinForm, but I forgot to do it! And so there you see the problem:
READ YOUR DARNED CODE BEFORE POSTING YOUR PROBLEM ON STACKOVERFLOW!
Less embarrassment that way.
ETA: Also, if I had posted the above code in my question, as #Rockster suggested, someone would have noticed it immediately, perhaps saving a step or two.

ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript On Button Click (within updatepanel) Does not fire on FIRST click

My project is essentially a web page with a menu and an updatepanel. The user selects a choice from the menu, and a usercontrol is loaded into the updatepanel. I would prefer not to use an update panel, but, there are multiple databound controls that contain information that will then change the contents of another databound control. Anyways, my project calls for a message box to appear on the screen, which I have no issue in getting to work:
string s= "<script>alert('HayGuise');</script>";
ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(c.Page, c.Page.GetType(), GUID.NewGUID().ToString(),s,false);
Now, I've tried a number of different tactics, including replacing GUID with a static string; I've used RegisterStartupScript, etc. My issue is that the message box does not show on the first click of the call button AFTER the updatepanel has updated to show a new usercontrol. But, if I click the button again, everything is great. If this is done on the very first form loaded into the updatepanel (opening up the site and selecting from the menu), everything works fine; it is only when the updatepanel updates again with a new form, that this will occur, and again, only on the first click.
Additionally, the code is being fired, and all code that follows the ScriptManager code fires, but the message box will not show until the button is clicked again. As I am testing this behavior at the moment, I've added the popup code to each of the buttons on the form, and the behavior is the same with each of them. It sucks that its taken so long to implement a reliable piece of code (for the messagebox) only to have this slight issue, and this is after I just figured out why my button events were firing twice on a single click. I pretty sure that it's going to be something simple, some sort of property that I'm not familiar with that needs to be set correctly. Damn, I'd love to just be able to settle all these little issues so I can proceed with the rest of the project. Sooooo close. Thank you for any help.
Edit: Additionally, the buttons are located in another usercontrol that is added to the usercontrol form that is shown in the updatepanel.
Edit II:
Thanks for your input, I apologize for getting back to this so late, I moved on to other parts of the project and just came back to this. The issue is not the startupscript method, nor the clientscriptblck method; the issue resides in the loss of value/viewstate/clientid's on postback.
At the time I posted this question, this project was a single page application. I tested functionality by creating a multipage application, and just kept going from there, vowing to come back to this issue. Well, I'm back and the issue does not reside in the update panel, it has something to do with my code, as I clear out the update panel (tried with a regular panel as well) and then reload the new usercontrol. When cleared, something goes haywire, and nothing fires on the first postback. Its a weird issue, that I have yet to find much (a couple articles) information on that is specific to just the first postback causing this issue. I'll update with an answer if I ever find one; the only fix I've found is to add a line to the menu select code, Server.Transfer(thecurrentpage), essentially refreshing the page. This solves all of the issues, but it seems a bit in poor taste. Thanks again for your input.
If you are working with AJAX UpdatePanel, following code should work for you. In my case, I was using update panel and none of the about worked except this one.
ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(myUpdatePanelID, myUpdatePanelID.GetType(), "myFunction", "myFunction();", true);
If you are using update panel in your page then the following code should work for you. You should use the RegisterStartupScript in the whole page using "this".ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(this, this.GetType(), "myFunction", "myFunction();", true);

MessageBox doesn't show on mdi form after a long calculation

This is a very similar problem to This one, sadly that one was never answered either.
I have a MDI Main forum that hosts several children forms. One of them does a long calculation and throws an exception if an error occurs (all work is done on the same thread). I then try to inform the user of an error with an messagebox, however it doesn't appear (but steals focus from the MDI Main, so the application is completely unresponsive).
The beheviour changes slightly if I call Application.DoEvents() (evil I know, but this is a last resort thing). Then the forms remain completely active and the messagebox only appears after I change active application (Alt+Tab) to something else and then back again.
What can I do to make sure the messagebox will be visible? I have already tried passing both, active child and MDI Main as parameter to the MessageBox.Show method. It doesn't change the behaviour.
To clarify: the messagebox is a part of the child form, however at this point I am willing to show it in any way that doesn't break the application. The messagebox should be modal, but it should be visible so it can be acknowledged by the user.
I had the same issue. When pressed ALT the popup showed.
It turned out to be a LinkedLabel that had the AutoSize property to true. The LinkedLabel was inside a FlowLayoutPanel. When I set the LinkedLabel.Text property to String.Empty. The LinkedLabel constantly tried to resize, which was causing the GUI to be constantly busy.
When I turned off the AutoSize property and the GUI no longer had to recalculate the positions. The GUI was no free. And the popup showed.
There could be other controls that are behaving the same.
See also:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/116884
Is the MessageBox shown in the MainForm or as part of the ChildForms? If the MessageBox is in the child Forms maybe you could pass an event back to the MainForm and open the MessageBox there.
The problem is that messageboxes tend to be modal.
In this instance I think that you'd do far better to use a delegate or an event with a handler in your main MDI code. That way your main application displays the message boxes. You can easily redefined an EventArgsType if you wish to pass whatever information that you require.

Problem changing values in textbox

Simplifying
I have a text box and a button
The button just create an messagebox with the text from the textbox.
But i change the value of the textbox, the new value apears (Ex: Type 123) but the message box does not show the value.
If i try to use the value in the programming (get the value by textbox1.text) the variable has nothing ( textbox1.text = "") but i can still see what i typed in the form.
Anyone has any clue?
Your button's click event handler should look something like this
private void button_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(textBox.Text);
}
I suspect you already have code similar to this and that at some point the textbox is cleared or otherwise set to String.Emppty but without seeing actual code it is difficult to help you
When/where did you check the value of textBox1.Text? If you're checking it in the constructor, Form1_Load, or anything else that occurs before you'll have typed text, you will get an empty value.
To properly check the value of textBox1.Text, you should set what's called a breakpoint on the line that calls MessageBox.Show(textBox1.Text). To do this, click in the grey area of the source editor (it's on the far left) on the line containing MessageBox.Show(..). A red circle will appear and your code should be highlighted. When you run your application and click on your button, your application should pause and Visual Studio will highlight that line and from here you can hover over "textBox1.Text" in the MessageBox.Show() line and it should show you the current value.
If your application is as simple as a form, a textbox, and your button1_Clicked event handling code, this should work no problem. If it is not this simple, then you need to look for anything that sets the value of the textBox in your code and make sure it isn't passing any blank values by using breakpoints.
To solve this properly, though, we really need more information.
Thanks Eric and Crippledsmurf. As both of you said, its hard to help without the code.
The problem I found is that when calling the form, I send some objects by reference, so I can track them down and I found that when (don't ask me why it happens that way, I'm still working on it) the construtor is called he make an new component, so the component in the interface no longer represents the one pointed by the variable "textbox1" (Yes Crash893, I haven't mispelled the name).
I found that I was making some mess with the references, and probably that was causing the problem. I fixed the problem by changing the actions performed by references for delegates and events, but I couldn't track down the exactly source of the problem.
Thanks, again, everyone for the insights.

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