Load form without showing it

The problem is: the concept of "loading" the form is purely fictional. The form is created, get shown/hidden and closes. You could be distracted be the event Form.Load. MSDN explains it: "Occurs before a form is displayed for the first time.". There is a protected method Form.OnLoad which is called before showing the form for the first time, which could be overridden.

So, it looks like the sole purpose of "loading" is… calling the user-supplied delegates put in the invocation list of the event Form.Load. There is no loading per se.

You can safely ignore this event and the concept of loading — it does not actually load anything. Create an instance of the form class to show it later, that's it. There is a log of confusion around this fictional concept. I hope I clarified things.

—SA

I know this is an old question, but I just stumbled upon it and am pretty surprised no one has mentioned SetVisibleCore:

bool isVisibleCore = false;
protected override void SetVisibleCore(bool value)
{
    base.SetVisibleCore(isVisibleCore);
}

In that code snippet, as long as isVisibleCore remains false, the form will remain invisible.

This is sort of a hack but I am doing it successfully with opacity = 0 and opacity = 100. This prevents the form from "showing" even if .Show() is called to be able to perform actions in _Load eventhandler.