How do I show a “Loading . . . please wait” message in Winforms for a long loading form?

Question

I have a form that is very slow because there are many controls placed on the form.

As a result the form takes a long time to loaded.

How do I load the fo

Answer 1

You should create a background thread to to create and populate the form. This will allow your foreground thread to show the loading message.

Answer 2

You can take a look at my splash screen implementation: C# winforms startup (Splash) form not hiding

Answer 3

I put some animated gif in a form called FormWait and then I called it as:

// show the form
new Thread(() => new FormWait().ShowDialog()).Start();

// do the heavy stuff here

// get the form reference back and close it
FormWait f = new FormWait();
f = (FormWait)Application.OpenForms["FormWait"];
f.Close();

Answer 4

Well i do it some thing like this.

        NormalWaitDialog/*your wait form*/ _frmWaitDialog = null;


        //Btn Load Click Event
        _frmWaitDialog = new NormalWaitDialog();
        _frmWaitDialog.Shown += async (s, ee) =>
        {
            await Task.Run(() =>
           {
               // DO YOUR STUFF HERE 

               //Made long running loop to imitate lengthy process
               int x = 0;
               for (int i = 0; i < int.MaxValue; i++)
               {
                   x += i;
               }

           }).ConfigureAwait(true);
            _frmWaitDialog.Close();
        };
        _frmWaitDialog.ShowDialog(this);

Answer 5

You want to look into 'Splash' Screens.

Display another 'Splash' form and wait until the processing is done.

Here is an example on how to do it.

Answer 6

Another way of making "Loading screen" only display at certain time is, put it before the event and dismiss it after event finished doing it's job.

For example: you want to display a loading form for an event of saving result as MS Excel file and dismiss it after finished processing, do as follows:

LoadingWindow loadingWindow = new LoadingWindow();

try
{
    loadingWindow.Show();                
    this.exportToExcelfile();
    loadingWindow.Close();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    MessageBox.Show("Exception EXPORT: " + ex.Message);
}

Or you can put loadingWindow.Close() inside finally block.