The WinForms Notepad Project: Auto Save Improvements (Premium)

When I implemented Auto Save in our Notepad clone this past week, I noted that the new feature was “quick and dirty.” It was, perhaps, a bit too much of both: As a reader pointed out, the Save As dialog that will appear after 30 seconds could fire while the user was viewing the Message Box-based prompt asking you whether you wanted to disable the auto-save functionality, which could lead to some problems. I wrote a fix for that issue quickly; I actually changed the code in the original article that same day because I felt it was important to do so. But I also realized that it could happen whenever the application was displaying a dialog of any kind, including File Open, File Save, various message boxes, and more. So we will need to make a similar fix in each case.

And there are a lot of them.

My first thought was that whenever the application displays a dialog box, we would need to check whether Auto Save is enabled. If it is, we would then need to disable the interval timer that triggers an auto-save, and then we would likewise need to reenable the interval timer when the dialog box closes.

But that approach is kind of unsophisticated: The only time the interval timer really needs to be disabled is when the auto-save would display a Save As dialog. That is, if the current document is saved, then the auto-save can just happen in the background, and we don’t need to worry about disabling and then reenabling the interval timer.

So this should be an easy thing to fix. The problem is that we need to make sure we make it in every instance in which we display a dialog box of any kind. So instead of writing the same code in many event handlers, we’ll create two methods of our own and call them instead. The first will be called before a dialog box is displayed, and will look like so:
Private Sub CheckTimerInterval()
   If TextHasChanged = True And DocumentName = "" And AutoSaveToolStripMenuItem.Checked Then
       Timer1.Enabled = False
   End If
End Sub
In English: If the text has changed, the document has not been saved, and Auto Save is enabled, then we will disable the timer.

The second method will be called after a dialog box is displayed. It makes the same checks and then disables the timer if required:
Private Sub ResetTimerInterval()
   If TextHasChanged = True And DocumentName = "" And AutoSaveToolStripMenuItem.Checked Then
       Timer1.Enabled = True
   End If
End Sub
After creating those two new methods at the bottom of Form1.vb, we need to figure out where to call them. There are, unfortunately, multiple places we will need to do so.

The first is the FontToolStripMenuItem_Click event handler, which currently looks like so:

But it will look like this after we add our calls to CheckTimerInterval and ResetTimerInterval:

OK, so that’s not so terrible. But we need to make similar changes to the following event handers too:

OpenToolStripMenuItem_Click
S...