> On 12/5/07, Frans Bouma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > I've not seen this behavior before, but here are some pointers which might
> > help:
> > 1) always make the application's main form the PARENT of the modal dialog.
> > Don't ever open a modal dialog with the desktop as parent for example.
>
> So if I have the following scenario
>
> Window 1 --opens---> Window 2 ----opens---> Window3
>
> And Window3 is a modal dialog box, then the parent is Window1 and not
> Window2???
Parent of window3 is window2, as window2 opens window3.
> 2) in the properties of a dialog, you can specify to show the dialog in the
> > taskbar. It might be a good idea to switch this on. The modal dialog will
> > get
> > its own button in the taskbar and if the dialog gets hidden or minimized,
> > the
> > user can select it again by clicking the button in the taskbar
>
> This would seem like an awkward fix. My assumption is that .NET should know
> to make the modal dialog's Z-Order ahead of any other application window.
> That would seem really easy to implement but they haven't done it that way
> (hence a modal dialog could be behind other windows)... again, strange.
It's windows who controls the Z-order, not .net :)
The button in the taskbar isn't always awkward. For example if you
spawn a dialog which starts a process and the dialog is rather big, so the
user spends say 2 minutes in it, it could be a good idea to have the taskbar
button.
> 3) never ever open 2 modal dialogs at once. The concept of a modal dialog is
> > to make sure the user fulfills the dialog before continuing with the
> > application. If you need to open more than one, consider other layouts of
> > the
> > UI.
>
>
> This I am doing. Which is what I'm thinking of reversing. But this would
> also seem rather restrictive. Imagine you had a modal dialog and from that
> dialog you wanted to show a message box. That's 2 modal dialogs at once. So
> if you have a custom modal dialog you can't use any of the system provided
> modal dialog boxes??
The thing is that if you have 2 modal dialogs, who's first? The point
of a modal dialog is that the user can't go somewhere else.
Anyway, you might want to look into docking. So an MDI kind of
approach where you dock windows into a main window with tabs and sliding
panels.
FB
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