Winforms - order of Load and Activated events

Question

One of our users has sent in a log for our .NET Winforms application that indicates that the Activated event is occurring before the Load

Answer 1

From Order of Events in Windows Forms at MSDN:

Application Startup and Shutdown Events

The Form and Control classes expose a set of events related to application startup and shutdown. When a Windows Forms application starts, the startup events of the main form are raised in the following order:

System.Windows.Forms.Control.HandleCreated

System.Windows.Forms.Control.BindingContextChanged

System.Windows.Forms.Form.Load

System.Windows.Forms.Control.VisibleChanged

System.Windows.Forms.Form.Activated

System.Windows.Forms.Form.Shown

When an application closes, the shutdown events of the main form are raised in the following order:

System.Windows.Forms.Form.Closing

System.Windows.Forms.Form.FormClosing

System.Windows.Forms.Form.Closed

System.Windows.Forms.Form.FormClosed

System.Windows.Forms.Form.Deactivate

Are you using a MessageBox in any of your startup events? This can cause the events to appear to trigger out of order because of the way the Windows Forms Message Loop handles dialog windows.