Adding Radio Buttons on a MessageBox/DialogBox

Question

Is it possible to add radio buttons on a msgbox/dialog message without creating a form like:

MessageBox.Show("Select Option", "Test", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo, MessageBoxIcon.Question)

What I'm trying to achieve is that, with Yes/No Buttons I could add a radio buttons at the upper part of the message without creating a new winform/userform.

Let me know if this is achievable then if so please give me any good reference that might help achieve this stuffs.

Answer 1

As has been suggested, the simple solution is to create your own form and display it using the ShowModal method. It will work just like a MessageBox, but you can put any control you want on it.

You don't appear to be satisfied with that. In fact, there is a way to do this with a message box, but it is way too complicated. It involves installing a hook that will trigger when the message box is displayed, and then writing a bunch of code that will dynamically add controls and manipulate the layout of the message box. Which will have to be done with a bunch of P/Invoke because the message box is a native Win32 dialog, not a Windows Form. The wrapper classes won't be of any help. Really not worth it. Message boxes aren't designed to be extensible.

Consider using a Task Dialog instead. This is almost exactly what they are designed for. Instead of radio buttons, you use a series of command buttons that describe the choices that are available. This is a better UI because only a single click is required to make a choice, rather than two. It would look something like this:

"Do you want to save your work?" is called the Main Instruction and should be kept very short. Then there's a supplemental instruction underneath it that provides more details, if the user wants to read it. Finally, you have the series of command links that contain a brief and detailed description of what will happen when the user clicks them. In this case, "Save work" and "Don't save".

(The example is a dumb use of a Task Dialog. You should just use regular old buttons for Save/Don't Save. But it was the best example I could find on Google images.)

If you want, you can actually put radio buttons into a Task Dialog:

In fact, as that image shows, you can pretty much anything you want into a Task Dialog—way too much. It is very customizable. That is the big improvement it offers over the venerable old MessageBox API.

There is a .NET wrapper for the Task Dialog API available here .