Detect both left and right mouse click at the same time?

Question

I'm remaking windows Minesweeper (from XP) and something they had included was that if you click a number with as many flags as it's number with the left and right mouse button at the same time, it reveals every other hidden tile around that number.

I'm having a hard time telling when both the Left and Right mouse buttons are pressed at the exact same time... I'm using a pair of bools, one for each button with the OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp events but if the 2 buttons are clicked at the exact same time (or really close), then only one MouseDown event goes off and the other does not... If you click and hold one of the buttons then click and hold the other, the code works though.

Is there a better way to detect this kind of "dual" click?

Edit:

Alright, small story for why I messed this up (it worked all along).

I have a macbook pro running Windows 7. For those of you who don't know, the macbook pro has a single bar for a mouse button that normally left clicks, but if you place 2 fingers down it right clicks, so you can't do both (and no way to middle click). So I was building my app and sending it to my friend, he was telling me it wasn't working, so I posted this question. I finally decided to try it on my other laptop, a Dell XPS with 2 mouse buttons... Once it worked there I passed it along to other friends and they confirmed it worked. I don't know how my first friend messed it up, but moral of the story is don't buy anything Apple. At least that's the moral I got.

Answer 1

Create a class boolean variable for the left and right button defaulted to false. When the mouse down event fires set the variable to true and check if both are true. When the mouse up fires set the variable to false.

    public bool m_right = false;
    public bool m_left = false;

    private void MainForm_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        m_objGraphics.Clear(SystemColors.Control);

        if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left)
            m_left = true;
        if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right)
            m_right = true;

        if (m_left == false || m_right == false) return;
        //do something here
    }

    private void MainForm_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left)
            m_left = false;
        if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right)
            m_right = false;
     }

Answer 2

Complete Code:

    private void Form1_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left) leftPressed = true;
        else if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right) rightPressed = true;


        if (leftPressed && rightPressed)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Hello");

            // note: 
            // the following are needed if you show a modal window on mousedown, 
            // the modal window somehow "eats" the mouseup event, 
            // hence not triggering the MouseUp event below
            leftPressed = false;
            rightPressed = false;
        }


    }

    private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left) leftPressed = false;
        else if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right) rightPressed = false;
    }

Answer 3

Try this,

Private Sub Form_Click(... , ByVal e As ystem.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs)

If e.Button = MouseButtons.Right And e.Button = MouseButtons.Left Then
MsgBox ('Right & Left code')

End If

Answer 4

Kind of an old question, but I came across this (coincidentally also while doing a Minesweeper clone) and felt it was missing something. If you want to have the two-button click but still catch regular single-button clicks as well, you can do the following:

private bool left_down;
private bool right_down;
private bool both_click;

private void Form1_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left)
    {
        left_down = true;
        if (right_down)
            both_click = true;
    }
    if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right)
    {
        right_down = true;
        if (left_down)
            both_click = true;
    }
}
private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left)
    {
        if (!right_down)
        {
            if (both_click)
                //Do both-click stuff here
            else
                //Do left-click stuff here
            both_click = false;
        }
        left_down = false;
    }
    if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right)
    {
        if (!left_down)
        {
            if (both_click)
                //Do both-click stuff here
            else
                //Do right-click stuff here
            both_click = false;
        }
        right_down = false;
    }
}

It moves the detection to the mouse-up rather than the mouse-down. It doesn't do anything until you release both buttons. This works almost exactly like the Windows 7 version of Minesweeper, except that the right button alone in the original operates on mouse-down. (I honestly prefer my version). There's a bit of redundancy in that the both-click case is called in two places depending on whether you release the left or right button first, but this should probably be a single-line function-call anyhow. Bonus: You can check the both_click flag from elsewhere in order to draw the hint-square around your cursor showing which squares will be revealed when you release the buttons.

Answer 5

Another option is to use the static MouseButtons on the System.Windows.Forms.Control class

This will tell you which mouse buttons are currently pressed so that you can do something like the following:

((Control.MouseButtons & MouseButtons.Right) == MouseButtons.Right) &&
((Control.MouseButtons & MouseButtons.Left) == MouseButtons.Left)

You can also check out the MSDN example

Answer 6

I got the following code to work in my Click Event.

if ((Control.MouseButtons == MouseButtons.Right) || (Control.MouseButtons == MouseButtons.Left))

When only one mouse button is being pressed the "Control.MouseButton" assumes the value of "MouseButtons.None"

But when both the left and right mouse buttons are being pressed the "Control.MouseButton" assumes the value of either "MouseButtons.Right" or "MouseButtons.Left" according to which was pressed first / last (depending on how long time it was between the left and right button being pressed)