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I have a requirement where the user wants to be able to click a button to show a dialog with some information. They want the ability to move the dialog off of the form and put focus back on the calling form and make changes to the calling form with the dialog still open.

It is basically a map on the main form and the dialog is a map legend.

Is this possible? How would I accomplish this task? It seems like I would need to do something with a panel like how Visual Studio does this with their dockable panels.

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3 Answers 3

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Call the Show method instead of ShowDialog.

This method is a non-blocking call (unlike ShowDialog, it will return immediately, not after the new form closes) and will not show the form modally.
You'll probably want to pass the parent form as the parameter so that it will show as a child form.

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Wow, I am a bonehead. This was easy. Shows that I am new to WinForms. –  Brandon Nov 5 '10 at 13:18

Insead of calling legendForm.ShowDialog(), just use legendForm.Show(). It will display the legend form without restricting the map's usage.

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You can show the dialog in non-modal way.

Like this:

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