C# Dialogs, Part 2 - Custom Dialogs [Beginner]

OK, so in Part 1 we went over the MessageBox that C# offers. As simple and easy as it is to use MessageBox, sometimes you need something more customized to your needs. Although MessageBox is extremely simple to use, it is almost as easy to create your very own dialog and use whatever you want.

The first thing we must do is create a new project. I named my project "Custom Dialog", but any name will do. Once your project is created and ready, the first step is to create a new windows form to be our dialog, which is a simple process. All you need to do is right-click on your solution in the Solution explorer, go to Add, then Windows Form. The screenshot below shows you exactly how its done.

Now we need to work with our new form, first go ahead and put a label on it, representing the question or dialog text. Once the label is all squared away, we need to add the buttons. Adding the button is easy enough, but we need to change them in order for them to work for the dialog. Once you have your buttons, you need to change a property you may not actually know about, the DialogResult property. If you recall, in part one, you learned about the enum called DialogResult, and believe it or not, this property correlates directly to that.

As you can see, the options for this properties are the same as the values in the DialogResult enum. For our dialog, I set one button to return Ok, and to be a little tricky the other button returns nothing. This way, the user can only select one option, which will make since later.

That is really all you have to do in order to build a custom dialog, but now we have to use it. Windows forms are actually just like any other class, you have to create a new instance, then you can use it. So we need to do just that, after you create an instance of your new form, the key in using the form as a dialog is the ShowDialog() method. In C#, all forms have this method, and when it is used instead of the normal Show() method, it will act just like a message box dialog. So when the user pushes a button, the form is closed and a result is returned. The code looks an awful lot like our MessageBox code:

CustomForm CustForm = new CustomForm();
if (CustForm.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
{
    MessageBox.Show("You know it!");
}

As you can see, we have 2 buttons, but as I said only one returns a value. This way no one can lie about who has the best tutorials.