ActiveForm property

[Elmo Watson]

in VB6, I'd have a MDI form (frmMain), with a midi CHild - -
then, I'd have dialogs that I run to change certain items on the rtb
(txtEdit) of the Active MDI child....

to do this, I'd say something like:
frmMain.ActiveForm.txtEdit.Seltext = "whatever"

in DotNet - - even though I have frmMain designated as an MDI form, whenever
I reference something like the above statement, wherever I'm doing it,
'frmMain' is not recognized....

Can someone set me going in the correct direction, please?

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

in VB6, I'd have a MDI form (frmMain), with a midi CHild - -
then, I'd have dialogs that I run to change certain items on the rtb
(txtEdit) of the Active MDI child....

to do this, I'd say something like:
frmMain.ActiveForm.txtEdit.Seltext = "whatever"

in DotNet - - even though I have frmMain designated as an MDI form, whenever
I reference something like the above statement, wherever I'm doing it,
'frmMain' is not recognized....

From within an MDI child:

\\\
DirectCast(Me.MdiParent.ActiveMdiChild, ChildForm).txtEdit.Text = "Foo"
///

 

[Elmo Watson]

What about from one of the extra dialog boxes I've created that's not an MDI
child?
(3 entities - - MDI parent/MDI child - various spawned dialog boxes which
affect the active MDI child)

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

What about from one of the extra dialog boxes I've created that's not an MDI
child?
(3 entities - - MDI parent/MDI child - various spawned dialog boxes which
affect the active MDI child)

Then it's the easiest solution to pass a reference to the MDI main form
to the dialogs (for example, in a property).

 

[Elmo Watson]

Creating a new property is the EASIEST way????

That, I just don't get - - why can't I just refer to the form directly???

with frmmain.activeform.txtedit.seltext - - - - that was extremely easy and
perfectly direct - - there are WAY too many times in this application where
I will enter text into the ActiveChild form, from a dialog box, to create a
property for every occasion such as this....

anyone have any other ideas?

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

Creating a new property is the EASIEST way????

That, I just don't get - - why can't I just refer to the form directly???

with frmmain.activeform.txtedit.seltext - - - - that was extremely easy and
perfectly direct - - there are WAY too many times in this application where
I will enter text into the ActiveChild form, from a dialog box, to create a
property for every occasion such as this....

That's because default instances don't exist any more. You can archieve
similar behavior by implementing the singleton design pattern in your
main form (have a Google search on that).

 

[Elmo Watson]

OK - I'll admit it - I'm totally mistified by this VB.Net Windows Forms
stuff - - I spent six years programming with regular VB and I thought this
wouldn't be too hard - - I feel like I landed on a different planet and I
don't understand a word anyone is saying.

I googled on the singleton design and, even though I found a lot of pages
about it - I don't understand it in the slightest.
Is there somewhere online that has some source code to show me how this is
done?

I'm spending too much time tracking down things that I don't understand to
begin with and getting more and more confused, the more you tell me -

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

OK - I'll admit it - I'm totally mistified by this VB.Net Windows Forms
stuff - - I spent six years programming with regular VB and I thought this
wouldn't be too hard - - I feel like I landed on a different planet and I
don't understand a word anyone is saying.

I googled on the singleton design and, even though I found a lot of pages
about it - I don't understand it in the slightest.

Does this article help to understand it?

<URL:http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnbda/html/singletondespatt.asp>