AJAX-style Asynchronous Progress Dialog for WinForms

codeproject.com — A base class for adding a rich asynchronous progress animation to any Form. My company develops a lot of rich-client applications and we have forever wanted a nice "slick" way to indicate to the user when activity is occuring in the background. Rarely do we know how long an operation will take (web services, remoting calls etc) so we always use to just stick a little barber pole type animation in the top-right corner of the main application window. This was never a perfect solution though because we still had to do all the nasty "locking" of the Control/Form to make sure they couldn't queue up another action. Moreover, setting Enabled = False on many WinForms controls can look quite ugly and inconsistent especially if the Form has got a variety of different controls. In recent years AJAX on the web has actually pioneered some interesting GUI concepts. I've always liked it when web sites pop-up with a central window that turns the background slightly darker and then ask you for some input. Then you type that input in and press an OK button and then you get a nice little barber pole animation to indicate it has gone off back to the server and is waiting for a reply for the next step (if any). That's basically what this project is about. Bringing that "cool" AJAX-style asynchronous indication behaviour to WinForms. read more...

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