notification windows a la Outlook

[CBanu [IXIA]]

Hi all,

I've been recently struggling to get to the bottom of this, but can't
find the proper way to do this. I have a notification window, which may
appear on screen when certain events are received. Currently the notes
are created and displayed on the main form's gui thread. It works ok,
until you go into 'modal' mode. That is, if there are a modal form and
the note simultaneously on the screen, I cannot click on the notify
window.

There are two scenarios here: first the note pops up, then a modal
window is opened; or the other way around: you receive the note while
the modal window is on top. In both cases, I can't access the note.

I looked at Outlook, how it behaves, and you can access the note (of
course, trying to 'open' the email results in a warning message,
stating it can't do that while modal windows are opened). I believe
Outlook is using a different thread for the notes. I tried to do this,
but it's not that easy. Notes must be _created_ (and displayed) on the
'notification thread'.

Bottom line: I want to be able to create and display the notes from the
gui thread, on the notes' thread (ideally I want only one thread for
all notes, not one thread for each note).

Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Cosmin.

 

[Bryan Phillips]

If you want everything to be created on the main thread, pass the modal
window as a parameter into the Show method of your notification window.

If you need to get a little more flexible, you can get your
application's top most form by calling Form.ActiveForm.