How to show form in front in C#

Question

Folks,

Please does anyone know how to show a Form from an otherwise invisible application, and have it get the focus (i.e. appear on top of other windows)?

Answer 1

This is what I use to bring an open form that is part of my application to the front. You can even use it with a button. But the form needs to be open or the application will break.

"YourOpenForm" has to be the name of your form from the properties window.

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Application.OpenForms["YourOpenForm"].BringToFront();
    }

Good Luck!

Answer 2

Activate() worked for me too.

BringToFront() did nothing in this case, I don't know why.

Answer 3

Form.Activate() worked in my case.

Answer 4

There's an overload of Form.ShowDialog() which takes an IWin32Window object. That IWin32Window is treated as the parent window for the form.

If you have the parent window as a System.Windows.Forms.Form, go ahead and just pass it. If not, get the HWND (maybe by P/Invoking to FindWindow()), and create a dummy IWin32Window implementation that just returns the HWND (More details).

Answer 5

Simply

yourForm.TopMost = true;

Answer 6

This is the final solution I wrote after 20 different attempts:

/* A workaround for showing a form on the foreground and with focus,
 * even if it is run by a process other than the main one
 */
public static void ShowInForeground(this Form form, bool showDialog = false)
{
    if (showDialog)
    {
        //it's an hack, thanks to http://stackoverflow.com/a/1463479/505893
        form.WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized;
        form.Shown += delegate(Object sender, EventArgs e) {
            ((Form)sender).WindowState = FormWindowState.Normal;
        };
        form.ShowDialog();
    }
    else
    {
        //it's an hack, thanks to http://stackoverflow.com/a/11941579/505893
        form.WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized;
        form.Show();
        form.WindowState = FormWindowState.Normal;

        //set focus on the first control
        form.SelectNextControl(form.ActiveControl, true, true, true, true);
    }
}