FolderBrowserDialog

This displays a directory selection window. Once the user selects a folder, we access it from the C# source. This is a convenient way to select folders (not files).

To add a FolderBrowserDialog to your Windows Forms project, please open the Toolbox by clicking on the View menu and then Toolbox.

Example code

First, double-click the FolderBrowserDialog entry. In the bottom part of your window, a FolderBrowserDialog box will be displayed.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 // Will be application-specific
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            //
            // This event handler was created by double-clicking the window in the designer.
            // It runs on the program's startup routine.
            //
            DialogResult result = folderBrowserDialog1.ShowDialog();
            if (result == DialogResult.OK)
            {
                //
                // The user selected a folder and pressed the OK button.
                // We print the number of files found.
                //
                string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(folderBrowserDialog1.SelectedPath);
                MessageBox.Show("Files found: " + files.Length.ToString(), "Message");
            }
        }
    }
}

ShowDialog

When the ShowDialog method is called, execution stops in this method. When the user clicks on OK or Cancel in the dialog, control flow returns here.

MessageBox

The MessageBox.Show method contains many overloads and can be used to display simple alerts and informative dialogs. It is simple to use.

We used FolderBrowserDialog to select a directory from the file system in the UI. We accessed the user's selection from the dialog when it is closed, and changed properties.