WinForms ToolTip will not re-appear after first use.

Question

I have a Forms C# application where I would like to use a toolTip on one of the text boxes. I Initialize the tool-tip in the constructor of the Form class, and it works the first time. So when I hover over the text box with my mouse it works, but once the toolTip times out and it goes away, it does not re-appear when I move my mouse away and back onto the control. I would expect it to come back and I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong.

Here is how I initialize the tooltip:

myTip = new ToolTip();
myTip.ToolTipIcon = ToolTipIcon.Info;
myTip.IsBalloon = true;
myTip.ShowAlways = true;

myTip.SetToolTip(txtMyTextBox,"My Tooltip Text");

Answer 1

I had this issue in VB.NET. What I did was drop a TooTip control on the form, and then on the target control's MouseHover event, I set the properties of the ToolTip. I did this because I used one ToolTip control for five different Label controls. It worked great. (Really, I wanted the ToolTip to show immediately, so I used the MouseEnter event instead.) I can post my exact code tomorrow when I get to work.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem today. Sometimes, the tooltip would not show. I had one ToolTip control for all the controls in my form.

I also had a MouseEnter event on all the controls added automatically, so I modified the MouseEnter event to do:

_tooltip.Active = false;
_tooltip.Active = true;

It fixed the bug, but I don't know why.

Also, the bug always happened on Windows XP machines, but not on Windows Vista.

Answer 3

For what its worth I was having this problem on my XP system until I noticed that if I placed at least one tooltip control on my form manually (from the toolbox) I could create as many tooltip as needed within my code and they would all work.

If however if I tried to create all tooltips in code (say for instance in the formload event) the tips would only show once never to be seen again. I can't give you the exact "why this happens" story, but I have duplicated this issue several times always with the same effect. It might have something to do with the object scope but I'm not sure.

So now just as a habit I alwasy include at least one VS tooltip control and then the rest within my code.

Answer 4

I guess you'll be happy to know that Microsoft knows about it...since about 5 years...

• 2/21/2005 Bug acknowledged as reproducable
• 3/29/2005 Hum we might fix it, but later...
• 11/15/2005 Well actually it's not a big bug, and it doesn't happen much, so we won't fix it.

Damn I love it when I stumble on bugs Microsoft doesn't want to solve! This time it's called a corner case, last time it was simply too difficult to resolve...

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/115385/tooltip-stop-showing-after-autopopdelay

I'm off to tell my client that the bugs in my program are just corner cases and too difficult to resolve...