C# - Making a Borderless Form Movable

Rahul Rajat Singh, 29 Mar 2012

Introduction
This article defines a way to make a border less form movable. There are many scenarios where we
may want to remove the default windows border but still want the form to be movable. This article
will explore one way of doing the same.

Background
I read a similar article few days back here. I tried to do this myself long back. This article presents a
very good way of moving the form but the logic for movement sometimes does not result in a
smooth movement and sometimes the form flickers a lot while moving. So I put my preferred way of
making a border less form movable and someone suggested I should have it as an alternative to this,
Here I am presenting the alternative way of doing the same thing in this article.

Using the code

The first thing that we need to do is to make the form border less. this can easily be done by setting
the FormBorderStyle property of this form to None.

After we set this property to null the Form will look like
The next step would be to handle the MouseDown event for the form. This event will contain the
code that will perform the form movement operation when the mouse is pressed and dragged.

The basic idea behind this technique is to use the windows messages to handle the form movement.
What we will do is whenever the user press the mouse button and moves the mouse we will send a
message to move the form according to the mouse movement. For this we first need to have the
possibility of sending the windows messages. First we will have to use the interop services by using
the namespace as

Hide Copy Code

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

The next thing would be to define the messages that will take care of moving the form. We will have
these as class member variables

Hide Copy Code

public const int WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN = 0xA1;
public const int HT_CAPTION = 0x2;
[DllImportAttribute("user32.dll")]
public static extern int SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int Msg, int wParam, int lParam);
[DllImportAttribute("user32.dll")]
public static extern bool ReleaseCapture();

and finally we will write the code to send the message whenever the user presses the mouse button.
The form will be repositioned as per the mouse movement if the user keep the mouse button
pressed.

Hide Copy Code

private void Form1_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
ReleaseCapture();
SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN, HT_CAPTION, 0);
}

Now the form is border less and movable too.

Points of Interest
There are many functions that can be used in much more elegant manner by using the windows
messages. Writing code ourselves could also be a good option but it is error prone and frankly "re-
inventing the wheel".

My article is in C# but the original article was meant for C++. but since it was basically for managed
C++, The same code and philosophy will work without much/any changes.