Watermark TextBox in WinForms

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The official term is “cue banner”. Here’s another way to do it, just inheriting TextBox gets the job done too. Add a new class to your project and paste the code shown below. Compile. Drop the new control from the top of the toolbox and set the Cue property.

You get a live preview of the Cue value in the designer, localized to the form’s Language property. Lots of bang for very little buck, an excellent demonstration of the good parts of Winforms.

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

class CueTextBox : TextBox {
    [Localizable(true)]
    public string Cue {
        get { return mCue; }
        set { mCue = value; updateCue(); }
    }

    private void updateCue() {
        if (this.IsHandleCreated && mCue != null) {
            SendMessage(this.Handle, 0x1501, (IntPtr)1, mCue);
        }
    }
    protected override void OnHandleCreated(EventArgs e) {
        base.OnHandleCreated(e);
        updateCue();
    }
    private string mCue;

    // PInvoke
    [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
    private static extern IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int msg, IntPtr wp, string lp);
}

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