A Generic Singleton Form Provider for C#
June 19, 2008
An interesting, although generally basic, problem with Windows Forms is how to implement the singleton pattern on the forms. What do I mean? Well, consider this…
You’re writing a Windows Forms application and you have a bunch of Forms, such as a Preference window, an About window and so on. You’d like these forms to be modeless, yet you don’t want the user to be able to create more than one of them.
It’s a common problem, but there’s no built in way to handle it. Moreover, I’ve yet to see an elegant solution to it. The method explained below, which is as elegant as it’s going to get, creates a pseudo-factory class to manage the problem for you. Read on to find out more.