Showing a form via Form.Show is not given focus?

I two forms, Form1, and a UserControl which hosts Form2. Within that UserControl on Form1 I call Form2.Show();. I have also tried Form2.Show(this);. Either way, the focus is not given to the form. I have to click once within the new form to give it focus, and then I can click items within that form.

I figured that control is passing back to my main control/form, and thus the focus is getting lost. So I am waiting until Form2 is closed via:

      while (form2.Visible == true)
      {
          System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);
          Application.DoEvents();
      }    

This seems to work. However after I close the form, now the reverse hol开发者_运维百科ds true. Form1 is not given focus (even if I call this.Focus()) until I click once within the main form window.

Any ideas how to handle this properly. I want to show a child form (modeless) and immediatley be able to click on it, and when that form is closed, immediately be able to take action back on the parent form.

You should probably use .ShowDialog(), this can also be extended to give your response on if the user performed Form2's operation properly or aborted early.

This does make the form locked in focus up front and will halt your code execution on the first form till that form is closed.

use this.Activate(); in place of this.Focus();

Not sure I follow completely, but from your UC try opening Form2 like this:

form2.Show(Parent);

This should specify the UC's Parent form as form2's owner.

This came from the fact that I was overriding WndProc in order to display the form. When I received the CBN_DROPDOWN message, I would display the form. I fixed this by instead Invoke'ing the method that shows the form and it fixed it.

case CBN_DROPDOWN:
    Invoke(new MethodInvoker(Show_DropDown));
    return;