MessageBox with a timeout for .NET

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Introduction

Have you ever wanted a message box that times out? Well here you go.

Using the code

1. Add MessageBoxEx.cs to your project or assembly your project references.
2. Change MessageBox.Show(...); calls to MessageBoxEx.Show(..., timeout);.
3. That's it!

Notes

1. MessageBoxEx has all 12 of the MessageBox.Show overloads.
2. The timeout is expressed in milliseconds.
3. MessageBoxEx does not support reentrancy. Good thing too. Why would you want to have more than one message box at the same time?
4. If the user doesn't press a button before the timeout elapses the function will return the DialogResult of the messagebox dialogs default button.

How does it work?

Just before calling MessageBox.Show(...), SetWindowsHookEx(WH_CALLWNDPROCRET, ...) is called. The hook proc looks for a WM_INITDIALOG on a window with text equal to the message box caption. A windows timer is started on that window with the appropriate timeout. When the timeout fires EndDialog is called with the result set to the dialog default button ID. You can get that ID by sending a dialog box a DM_GETDEFID message. Pretty simple.

References

KB318804: HOW TO: Set a Windows Hook in Visual C#.NET

Acknowledgements

GipsySoft: http://www.gipsysoft.com/messagebox. You'll find a C++ implementation with many more features.

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good article Donsw 18:51 17 Jan '09   good article, you might want to show some of the code in the article and a screen shot of the messagebox to make it a better article. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Very very very good code, but... seb.49 6:20 24 Apr '08   I have change your code to make a countdown messagebox. I know change the text to show the countdown : SetWindowText(hWnd, nCountDown); but it change the caption of the messagebox not the real text. Is someone know how to achive this issue ? Thanks Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 2.00/5 (1 vote) Does this support multi threading calls Kanna 6:23 22 Mar '08   If two threads calls this MessageBoxEx, would this be thread safe? I am a bit skeptical with the timer event ID being set to a constant 42. ~Kanna Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Does this support multi threading calls RodgerB 14:00 31 Mar '08   Timers belong to an HWND. An HWND belongs to the thread it was created on. The WM_TIMER will be received on the thread the HWND belongs to. So what does it matter what the timer ID is? As long as no one else is using it for a given HWND you're good to go. And since this is a MessageBox its pretty safe no one else is using ID 42. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink PocketPC richardjjs 22:56 14 Apr '07   This looks brilliant but I am not sure it will work in PocketPC(2003) I am getting 9 error messages the first of which is The type or namesapce name MessageBoxoptions could not be found (are you missin etc... The type or namespace nane IWin32Windows etc (eight messages based on this!! Richard Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote) Re: PocketPC RodgerB 5:50 15 Apr '07   This will not work on the pocket or compact framework. The implementation uses windows hooks which aren't available of the pocket. Sorry! Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Amazing azam's 19:21 13 Feb '07   hi Great work and thanks a lot for sharing too.. azam's Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Amazing Andreas Hollmann 1:24 2 May '07   I want also say thanks for this great article. Great work!!! Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink How to implement in CF Ajatashatru 4:19 13 Sep '06   As compact framework does not have this User32.dll then how can we implement this functionality. List of functions impoted not in coredll.dll 1.SendMessage 2.SetWindowsHookEx 3.GetWindowTextLength 4.GetWindowText Can somebody help me out, my mail id is yuvrajaa@integramicro.com/yuvraj_1981@walla.com Yuvraj Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: How to implement in CF RodgerB 4:46 13 Sep '06   Most functions should come from coredll.dll. However, some bad news. Windows CE doesn't support windows hooks. So you're SOL, sorry. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink ServiceNotification Ryan McFarren 11:23 5 Jun '06   Anyone had any luck getting it to work with MessageBoxOptions.ServiceNotification? We have a service that does some checks, makes system changes if necessary, and then tells the user they need to reboot. Hoping to put up a message box with a countdown to an auto-reboot. Works great, until I put the MessageBoxOptions.ServiceNotification option on. Nuts. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 2.00/5 (3 votes) MessageBoxTimeOut API function? eshipman 4:42 13 Dec '04   [quote]http://www.gipsysoft.com/messagebox. You'll find a C++ implementation[/quote] Why not use the MessageBoxTimeOut API function instead of having a whole freaking class? Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: MessageBoxTimeOut API function? RodgerB 6:08 13 Dec '04   Very interesting. 1) I had no idea there was such a function. 2) It's undocumented, it's generally not a good idea to use undocumented functions. Still, I would think you could try to use the undocumented version and if it's not there you could use this code. 3) Looking at another article on this site it appears that MessageBoxTimeOut is only available on WinXP. People do still write code for Win9X, WinNT, etc... 4) This technique for making a MessageBox with a timeout allows you do change the text of the buttons or move them around or do whatever else you need to do with MessageBox. The C++ code at gipsysoft does all of these things and more. I only needed the timeout so that's all I ported to C#. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 1.50/5 (2 votes) AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Anonymous 13:51 13 Oct '04   Hello, I like your MessageBoxEx with timer solution. I recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 beta 1 and get the following warning: Warning 2 'System.AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId()' is obsolete: 'AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId has been deprecated because it does not provide a stable Id when managed threads are running on fibers (aka lightweight threads). To get a stable identifier for a managed thread, use the Thread object returned from Thread.CurrentThread.' I cannot find a working substitute. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks, Dana Hall Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 RodgerB 17:17 13 Oct '04   That is interesting but I wouldn't worry about fibers much. They were intended to make the porting of Unix applications easier. I don't imagine they are used much in Windows apps. SetWindowsHookEx is a windows API after all. Perhaps in the new version of the .NET framework there is an managed alternative to SetWindowsHookEx. If you want to get rid of the warning use P/Invoke to get the current thread id. Regards, Rodger Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Anonymous 18:22 13 Oct '04   Rodger, Thanks for the help. This is what I did and it worked. I added this P/Invoke signature. [DllImport("kernel32.dll")] static extern int GetCurrentThreadId(); Then modified this line: hHook = SetWindowsHookEx(WH_CALLWNDPROCRET, hookProc, IntPtr.Zero, AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId()); To this line: hHook = SetWindowsHookEx(WH_CALLWNDPROCRET, hookProc, IntPtr.Zero, GetCurrentThreadId()); I am new to .NET, so this was a fun learning experiment. Thanks again, Dana Hall Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Tim McCurdy 2:56 7 Dec '04   This is off the top of my head, and I don't know if it will work in 2005, but try this instead... System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetDomainID() Or System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentContext.ContextID() Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Dan Ganiere 6:13 30 Aug '05   Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetHashCode GetHashCode on the thread object returns the thread ID. From MS Docs Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 J Whattam 20:36 4 May '06   I haven't tried this suggestion yet, but I have spent two days researching this problem on the NET to no avail until I stumbled across this message. Thanks very much. Maybe Microsoft should seriously think about a free brain transplant for some of its employees - who in their right minds would go looking for the thread ID under GetHashCode? John Whattam Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() is deprecated with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Janis Ozo 0:21 11 Feb '07   (int)AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId() change to: System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote) Thanks a lot aemmons 10:54 6 Oct '04   This class is exactly what I was looking for. Very helpful and so easy - just one extra parameter. Thanks again, I'll get a lot of use out of this. Anne Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink picture Taha Zayed 16:55 24 Sep '04   please put a picture to your article Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: picture RodgerB 0:51 25 Sep '04   What would you like to see a picture of? Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Namespace Errors when trying to build LordRhys 7:49 3 Sep '04   I started a test project and included your MessageBoxEx.cs file, when I try to build I get the following errors: E:\VBNet Projects\TestMessageboxEx\MessageBoxEx\MessageBoxEx.cs(12): The type or namespace name 'DialogResult' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) E:\VBNet Projects\TestMessageboxEx\MessageBoxEx\MessageBoxEx.cs(24): The type or namespace name 'MessageBoxButtons' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) E:\VBNet Projects\TestMessageboxEx\MessageBoxEx\MessageBoxEx.cs(48): The type or namespace name 'IWin32Window' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) I would like to compile this to a .dll if possible then use it in some of my VB apps. These errors are in a C# project. Thanks for any help you can provide. Frank Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Namespace Errors when trying to build RodgerB 8:00 3 Sep '04   Sorry, In my instructions, I assumed the assembly you were developing already had a reference to System.Windows.Forms and were using MessageBox.Show. Add that assembly reference and you should be good to go. MessageBoxEx is in the System.Windows.Forms namespace just like MessageBox. Regards, Rodger Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink

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