Question

Anyone who’s done any UI work with .Net and WinForms is very familiar with this type of code:

TestForm frm = new TestForm();
frm.ShowDialog();

I found myself wishing that a call to show a modal dialog was a little less verbose, more like a static call. Andf there is a simpler way. All you really need, in a simple case, is something like this:

new TestForm().ShowDialog();

Am i missing anything? Could there be any repercussions from this kind of shorthand? E.g. windows messages not handled/routed correctly, dialog’s resources not disposed etc.?

Was working on this when i saw Ray’s feedback:

i suppose an even shorter way would be to create a static member withing TestForm that creates an instance of itself and calls ShowDialog internally. So, this code:

public static DialogResult DoModal()
{
    return new TestForm().ShowDialog();
}

could be invoked thusly:

TestForm.DoModal();

Answer 1

If you don’t want to reuse the form object anywhere in your code you can just use the short form

new TestForm().ShowDialog();

If you want to do something later with that object then you must assign it to a variable.