Question

At work, i’m a trainer. I’m setting up lessons to teach people how to “do stuff” without a mouse… Ever seen people click “login” textbox, type, take the mouse, click “password”, type their password, then take the mouse again to click the “connect” button beneath ?

So i’ll teach them how to do all that without a mouse (among many other things, of course)

At the end of the course, i’ll make them pass a sort of exam.

So i’m building a little wizard based app in which i present some simili-real-life examples of forms to fill in, but i want to disable their mouse programatically while they do this test.

However, further in the wizard, i’ll have to let them use their mouse again.

Is there a — possibly easy — way to just disable the mouse for a while, and re-enable it later on?

I’m on C# 2.0, programming under VC# 2k5, if that matters

Answer 1

Make your form implement IMessageFilter.

Then add the following code to the form:

    Rectangle BoundRect;
    Rectangle OldRect = Rectangle.Empty;

    private void EnableMouse()
    {
        Cursor.Clip = OldRect;
        Cursor.Show();
        Application.RemoveMessageFilter(this);
    }
    public bool PreFilterMessage(ref Message m)
    {
        if (m.Msg == 0x201 || m.Msg == 0x202 || m.Msg == 0x203) return true;
        if (m.Msg == 0x204 || m.Msg == 0x205 || m.Msg == 0x206) return true;
        return false;
    }
    private void DisableMouse()
    {
        OldRect = Cursor.Clip;
        // Arbitrary location.
        BoundRect = new Rectangle(50, 50, 1, 1); 
        Cursor.Clip = BoundRect;
        Cursor.Hide();
        Application.AddMessageFilter(this);
    }  

This will hide the cursor, make it so that they can’t move it and disable the right and left mousebuttons.