How do I execute code AFTER a form has loaded?

Solution 1:

You could use the "Shown" event: MSDN - Form.Shown

"The Shown event is only raised the first time a form is displayed; subsequently minimizing, maximizing, restoring, hiding, showing, or invalidating and repainting will not raise this event."

Solution 2:

I sometimes use (in Load)

this.BeginInvoke((MethodInvoker) delegate {
  // some code
});

or

this.BeginInvoke((MethodInvoker) this.SomeMethod);

(change "this" to your form variable if you are handling the event on an instance other than "this").

This pushes the invoke onto the windows-forms loop, so it gets processed when the form is processing the message queue.

[updated on request]

The Control.Invoke/Control.BeginInvoke methods are intended for use with threading, and are a mechanism to push work onto the UI thread. Normally this is used by worker threads etc. Control.Invoke does a synchronous call, where-as Control.BeginInvoke does an asynchronous call.

Normally, these would be used as:

SomeCodeOrEventHandlerOnAWorkerThread()
{
  // this code running on a worker thread...
  string newText = ExpensiveMethod(); // perhaps a DB/web call

  // now ask the UI thread to update itself
  this.Invoke((MethodInvoker) delegate {
      // this code runs on the UI thread!
      this.Text = newText;
  });
}

It does this by pushing a message onto the windows message queue; the UI thread (at some point) de-queues the message, processes the delegate, and signals the worker that it completed... so far so good ;-p

OK; so what happens if we use Control.Invoke / Control.BeginInvoke on the UI thread? It copes... if you call Control.Invoke, it is sensible enough to know that blocking on the message queue would cause an immediate deadlock - so if you are already on the UI thread it simply runs the code immediately... so that doesn't help us...

But Control.BeginInvoke works differently: it always pushes work onto the queue, even it we are already on the UI thread. This makes a really simply way of saying "in a moment", but without the inconvenience of timers etc (which would still have to do the same thing anyway!).