C# 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 8

Using Standard Dialogs

Many applications need to display dialogs to let the user select certain standard pieces of information. Probably the most common dialogs let the user select a file to open and select a file to save into. Other dialogs let the user select colors, filesystem folders, fonts, and printers for printing.

Closely related to the print dialog are the print preview dialog (which lets the user see a preview of a printout before sending it to the printer, possibly saving paper if the user then cancels the printout) and the page setup dialog (which lets the user select things like margins before printing).

You could build all of these dialogs yourself (or you will be able to once you've finished reading this book), but why should you? If so many programs need the exact same features, why shouldn't someone build standard dialogs that everyone can use?

Happily that's exactly what Microsoft did.

C# comes with the following standard dialogs that handle these common tasks:

• ColorDialog
• FolderBrowserDialog
• FontDialog
• OpenFileDialog
• PageSetupDialog
• PrintDialog
• PrintPreviewDialog
• SaveFileDialog

NOTE

You might remember that in Lesson 1, I said, “Normally you don't need to worry about whether a feature is provided by Visual Studio, the C# language, or the .NET Framework.” That's true here as well, but it's informative to note that these dialogs are actually provided by the .NET Framework, not C#. That doesn't change the way you use them, but it means they're the ...