VB.NET 2005 Winforms Form Load Event

[CSGeach]

Hello all

In VB6, if you referred to a property or a some property of a control
of an unloaded form, it caused a form_load, and fired the Form_Load event.

I have a lot of code that depends on this behaviour: thus in order to achieve some initialization of my form , I have a general purpose routine as follows

Public Function ShowForm(ByRef FormToShow As Object, ByRef ShowModal As Boolean, ByRef FormTag As String) As Boolean
    ' routine shows a modal form: loads form and activates it before displaying
    Dim ModalState As Byte
    ModalState = IIf(ShowModal, VB6.FormShowConstants.Modal, VB6.FormShowConstants.Modeless)
    With FormToShow
      ' FormTag parameter indicates what state to load the form in
      .Tag = FormTag ' triggers Load event
      ' manually force code called by Form_Activate routine to execute before showing form
      ' note: must be a public function
      '2/7/01 CG Make the function FormInitialize a boolean one whereever it occurs; if it returns false, unload the form instead of showing it.
      'FormInitialize is a public boolean function in any form which is shown by this routine
      'It will typicall use the value of the form's tag, set above to perform initialization tasks
      If .FormInitialize Then
      'If the form's FormInitialize function returns true, show the form in the modal state indicated in the ShowModal parameter
        VB6.ShowForm(FormToShow, ModalState)
        ShowForm = True
      Else
        FormToShow.Close()
      end if
   end With
End Function
 

In VB6 line 7 .Tag = FormTag would set the form's tag to FormTag and force a form_load: this does not seem to happen in VB.NET 2005

Is there anyone out there who can give me some insight into this? I would have thought that the behaviour, much complained of in other places, almost had to be like that: what does it mean to refer to the .TAG property of a form that is not loaded?
By way of experiment, I have tried setting other properties of the form in this routine, but the form_load will not fire in these cases either.

Thank you

Charles Geach.

[Plater]

The Tag property in .net is just a scratch space to store extra data (as far as I can figure)

Generally:

Dim form1 As New Form1() 
form1.Show()
 

will show the form and trigger the LOAD event

[CSGeach]

The Tag property in .net is just a scratch space to store extra data (as far as I can figure)

Generally:

Dim form1 As New Form1() 
form1.Show()
 

will show the form and trigger the LOAD event

Well, thank you: the tag property in VB6 was the same. The thing is that I want to do some initialization before the form is shown, and in fact only show the form if that initialization succeeds.
As I said in my code snippet, referring to any property or control of the form would in VB6 trigger the form load.

Thank you again for any further insight into this