Replacement for yes/no/cancel MessageBox (C#)

I am looking for a decent replacement for the standard windows YES/NO or YES/NO/CANCEL MessageBox.

I have often seen these standard dialogs misused in ways such as: "To save in plain text answer YES, or to save in html answer NO". Obviously, the text should read "Save As: and the "buttons should be labeled "Text" and "HTML". It is not a yes/no question that is being asked, and although it could be phrased that way, it would not be easy to read and understa开发者_C百科nd.

Microsoft gives no way to change the text on the buttons. There is no fast/simple way to build a replacement from scratch... as evidenced by the number of applications using the awkward style mentioned above.

Is there any free C# replacement dialog or MessageBox out there that lets you at least:

- specify the number of buttons

- specify the text to appear on each button

- specify the default button

I have looked and have been unable to find one.

(I would build one myself, but I am not familiar enough with all the behaviors that a fully functional control should have, since I only need/use/know a small subset. Two examples I don't use: themes and internationalization. I need something that my coworkers will also want to use.)

Check out Dissecting the MessageBox on CodeProject. The project is a bit dated, but it's pretty much exactly what you're looking for and it shouldn't take much to update it.

Depending on your target platform, a task dialog may be a good way of doing this. There is a .NET wrapper for task dialogs in the Windows API Code Pack. However these are provided only in Windows Vista and above, not in XP or 2003.

Frankly, it is not that difficult to create such a Messagebox yourself, we have such a thing working in the current app we are developing.

What you need is a FlowLayout for the buttons that will auto-align any buttons you create. Our API then has something like (params Tuple<string,DialogResult>[] buttons)

Tuple is a helper class that contains two values. The string is the Text of the button, the Dialogresult is the one our messagebox returns when the button with said text is clicked.

I agree with Frank. It wouldn't be too difficult to create your own generic form that handles this for you. Without getting into code, the form should do the following

1) Have a property to set the message you want to show to the user.

2) Have a method for adding buttons, with 2 arguments, one for the button text, and one for the dialog result

3) When the form is displayed, it should be in modal dialog mode so that the rest of the application is inactive while until one of the options is clicked.

So, to create a Save As/Don't Save/Cancel, you would add 3 buttons in step 2, all with the appropriate button text and dialog result.

Using Flow layout, you should be able to get it to display properly regardless of the size of the message, or the number of buttons.