Develop Reference

C#/WinForms tooltip stops displaying

I'm facing the following issue during setting up tooltips on a WinForms / C# desktop application (using .NET Framework version 4.5).
Application has hundreds of form elements where I would like to display a tooltip.
Current implementation as the following:
I have one toolTip object on my main form
Language file has been loaded and saved in an array
There is a method which suppose to assign the tooltip texts to the different elements accordingly by calling the SetToolTip method on the toolTip object.
E.g.
toolTip.SetToolTip(backBtn, LocalizationFile[0]);
toolTip.SetToolTip(myTextBox, LocalizationFile[1]);
It works fine, tooltips are displayed correctly.
As soon as I reach ca. 30 calls it stops working.
Calling ~30 times SetToolTip method to setup the required tooltips, cause to completely stop displaying the tooltips.
The previously worked tooltip texts are not getting display anymore.
There is no exception or any error message.
Can you please explain me why the toolTip object just stops displaying the texts after calling the SetToolTip method several times? Is there any workaround out there to apply in such cases?
EDIT-1
Following workaround works, but I'm still unsure what is the original problem.
I have created a method to call SetToolTip on the toolTip object, after calling the method, I re-create the toolTip instance using the "new" operator. That solves the issue. However as I want to disable anytime the tooltips on my application I also store all the references in a List. On that list I can iterate over to enable / disable all toolTip references according to what the user wants.
Basically there is a button to toggle the tooltips.
Do you have any idea, why this actually solves the original issue?
List<ToolTip> storeToolTipReferences = new List<ToolTip>(); //store tooltip references
//method begin called to set the tooltip on a control, store the reference of the tooltip and create a new instance
private void SetMyToolTip(Control ctrl, string toolTipText)
{
toolTip.SetToolTip(ctrl, toolTipText);
storeToolTipReferences.Add(toolTip);
toolTip = new ToolTip();
}
//called as the application loads or the user changes the language
private void SetAppLanguage(string[] LocalizationText)
{
storeToolTipReferences.ForEach(e => e.RemoveAll());
SetMyToolTip(ctrl1, LocalizationText[1]);
SetMyToolTip(ctrl2, LocalizationText[2]);
SetMyToolTip(ctrl3, LocalizationText[3]);
.....
}
//logic for tooltip enable/disable in my application
storeToolTipReferences.ForEach(t => t.Active = tooltip_control.Checked);
Thank you!

Why is all of the text on my window blank?

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!

Setting description of an item in Visual Studio -and- changing what "this" refers to

I'm working in Visual Studio 2010 and I'm dealing with C#; I've made a statusStrip that I intend to use as my tool-tip viewer, its .text attribute changing depending on the control the mouse has entered. I've got two textBoxes and I'm trying to make it such that entering the control fires a function called tooltipEnter, and leaving it fires a function called tooltipLeave. Here's my code for those two functions:
private void tooltipEnter(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
toolStripStatusLabel1.Text = this.AccessibleDescription;
}
private void tooltipLeave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
toolStripStatusLabel1.Text = "Look here for tool-tips regarding the form!";
}
The problem with this is that, first, I'm not sure AccessibleDescription is the right attribute to saddle the description to, and I'm not sure of the most elegant way to do the toolStripStatusLabel1.Text assignment in the first place. Second, this in the program's frame of reference refers to the form on which these controls lay, not the controls themselves; How do I refer uniformly to "the control that just got entered" in a way that allows me to have just the one function for all entries, without having to make different ones for each control?

The problem with this is that, first, I'm not sure
AccessibleDescription is the right attribute to saddle the description
to, and I'm not sure of the most elegant way to do the
toolStripStatusLabel1.Text assignment in the first place.
AccessibleDescription is just some string instance referenced in your form, from this code. The text assignment is done in the only way possible. I'm not sure what your question is regarding this.
Second, this in the program's frame of reference refers to the form on
which these controls lay, not the controls themselves; How do I refer
uniformly to "the control that just got entered" in a way that allows
me to have just the one function for all entries, without having to
make different ones for each control?
sender is always the object from which the event was raised in the EventHandler delegate: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.eventhandler.aspx

Unable to Affect Scintilla Control Programmatically at Runtime

I'm attempting to use the ScintillaNET control in an application I am working on. I drag and drop the control into my form and run form. The control appears on the form. This is good. In addition, if I set any of the properties in the control's properties editor (ConfigurationManager.Language, for example), I am able to type in that language and see syntax highlighting occur.
Where I run into problems is when I attempt to change properties programmatically. For example, I attempt to load text from a file into the form (I'm doing this in the form's Load). The text doesn't display. I also can't seem to show the line numbers or do any other number of tasks (including programmatically change the Language).
Any idea what I may be doing wrong? Even something as simple as the code below doesn't seem to work:
private void scintilla1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
scintilla1.ConfigurationManager.Language = "xml";
}

Simply add scintilla1.ConfigurationManager.Configure();
private void scintilla1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
scintilla1.ConfigurationManager.Language = "xml";
scintilla1.ConfigurationManager.Configure();
}

After spending some time playing around with the different events, it appears that I cannot affect the Scintilla control until after it is already visible. Hence, the "Load" event does not let me make any programmatic changes to the control until I've set it visible.
It's a little strange, and seems sort of pointless to me to have the Load event at all, but I just wanted to let everybody know what is happening in case someone else ran into the same problem.

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.