How do I fill an empty textbox with default text?

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It looks like you’re describing a cue banner, which is prompt text that is displayed in an empty textbox. As of Windows XP, this functionality is natively supported by the operating system. The effect achieved doing it this way is much more elegant than setting the default text yourself in the TextChanged event. It looks like this:

     sample of textbox with cue banner text

Setting this up is accomplished at the level of the Windows API by sending the textbox control an EM_SETCUEBANNER message. To use this from a .NET project, you will have to use P/Invoke.

Fortunately, most of the work has already been done for you. This sample project is a quick and painless way to add cue banner support to an existing project. Here’s another sample, with a more complete explanation of the process.

If you don’t want your application to depend on an external DLL, you can add the necessary code directly to your project. The simplest way is to subclass the existing TextBox control, and add the code to support cue banners there. See this answer for the code you’ll need. If you have trouble converting it to VB.NET, try this tool.

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