Re: Splash Screen - My Nemesis

> I think now, to achieve the clients requirement of immediate feedback, I
> will forego the splash screen and show the main form immediately, delegating
> the database interaction to a separate thread started by the main form.
>
> Now, do I do this in the Load event, as I need the form to already be
> visible before I spawn another thread?

I think this is actually a very good approach - you can show the main
form (disable the controls while no interaction is allowed),
indicating your application is up and running, but provide some kind
of visual hint that the application is busy talking to the database.

About the thread spawning: don't do this yourself, use a
BackgroundWorker instead. This is a component you can put on your
form. Subscribe to its DoWork event and put your database code in
there, this will be executed on a background thread.

Do not access any controls from that event, just get the results of
the database query and put it in the DoWorkEventArgs.Results member.
If you get an error, put it in the Results member instead.

Subscribe to the BackgroundWorker's RunWorkerCompleted event, it will
be fired when DoWork has finished. Its event args will hold the Result
you previously assigned in DoWork. You can update your UI from this
event and either show an error message or the data retrieved from the
database.

Start the BackgroundWorker using RunWorkerAsync. If you need, you can
pass an argument to your DoWork method. There should be no problem
calling RunWorkerAsync from the form's OnLoad method.

Shouldn't be too hard that way, and it's easy to add progress
indicated or cancelation later, if needed (and possible).

Regards,
Fabian