Disabling and Enabling the Close Button in .NET 2.0 WinForms
Posted by Ken on January 23, 2010
In .NET 2.0 WinForms, the user is given the following control over the minimize/maximize/close buttons (otherwise known as the ControlBox):
- Disable/enable the Minimize button via the Form.MinimizeBox property
- Disable/enable the Maximize button via the Form.MaximizeBox property
- Show/hide the entire ControlBox via the Form.ControlBox property
However, you may want to allow maximizing and minimizing, but remove the user’s ability to close the application using the close button for any number of reasons. For example:
- You want to run some process that cannot be cancelled midway through.
- You want to ensure a user completes some number of tasks before being able to exit.
Unfortunately, this functionality is not supported by default. One must leverage the unmanaged code of the Windows API to achieve this behavior:
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Windows.Forms;
public class SuperForm : Form
{
private const int MF_BYPOSITION = 0x400;
protected void DisableCloseButton()
{
IntPtr hMenu = GetSystemMenu(this.Handle, false);
int menuItemCount = GetMenuItemCount(hMenu);
RemoveMenu(hMenu, menuItemCount - 1, MF_BYPOSITION);
DrawMenuBar((int)this.Handle);
}
protected void EnableCloseButton()
{
GetSystemMenu(this.Handle, true);
DrawMenuBar((int)this.Handle);
}
// Win32 API declarations
[DllImport("User32")]
private static extern IntPtr GetSystemMenu(IntPtr hWnd, bool bRevert);
[DllImport("User32")]
private static extern int GetMenuItemCount(IntPtr hWnd);
[DllImport("User32")]
private static extern int RemoveMenu(IntPtr hMenu, int nPosition, int wFlags);
[DllImport("User32")]
private static extern IntPtr DrawMenuBar(int hwnd);
}
Notice that I incorporated this functionality into a base class that all your forms can inherit from to gain this ability.
This entry was posted on January 23, 2010 at 3:01 pm and is filed under WinForms Tips. Tagged: Close Button, WinForms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Ken Kopczyk 
Mark said
Nice tutorial.
Do you know any or all of the implications of using unmanaged code? Recently I was trying to bundle all the files required dlls for a small app I wrote so that it could easily be distributed. Unfortunately it was dependent upon a third party library that had unmanaged code and every technique I read online and tried was unable to embed it.
I am curious what the ramifications are of using unmanaged code.
Ken said
What I’m curious about is what actual problems you were having. Was it the distribution that was the problem or the actual invocation of the 3rd party library during development? What was did this 3rd party software do?
I have an extremely similar scenario that I work with and have solved it on both ends. Let me know!
Mark said
Basically we purchased a 3rd party DLL that manipulates PDFs. I tried some software from Microsoft that is supposed to embed DLLs in the executable but this software did not work due to the fact that the DLL contained unmanaged code.
I also tried a technique that involved treating the DLL as a resource and dynamically loading the assembly with reflection. I forget the specific wall I ran into with this approach but I suspect it was related to security issues.
Ken said
Here’s what I would do:
1. Put the 3rd party dll into your Windows\System32 directory and register it by running this command:
2. Add a reference to the dll via Visual Studio as you normally would. It should create a .NET dll called Interop.foo.dll when building. See my previous post for info for this.
3. Invoke in the code.
4. For deployment, use a Setup Project (vdproj). Add the dll to “System Folder” and register it as vsdrfCOM. Also add your project output (obviously).
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