Hi everyone.

Priors: Using MS VC# 2008 Express on a Windows XP SP3 system

I'm playing around with utilizing MDI Forms for an application I'd like to write. Knowing some things about the actual production application, I'm trying to implement them to test them out but I'm running into a few issues hence my post.

First and foremost, one of the things I'd like to accomplish is something that I've found helps users out a bit and that's making non-active windows in a multiple-window environment translucent. I wrote an application like that a while ago and it turned out a little better than what I thought. However there's a slight problem with doing this to MDI children forms and it think it has to do with my relying on the focus mechanism for forms. My conclusion at this point is that MDI children never really have direct control over their focus since they belong to a MDI parent form which would control the attribute. I'm not sure if this is actually the case but if anyone could give me some pointers on this I'd appreciate it.

One last thing I'd like to address is a seemingly "slacker" method of doing things but I just can't figure it out. I've written a class that has the sole purpose of managing a list of objects (this "list" is actually a dictionary) so that it could not only be portable but avoid a global dictionary variable just hanging around. As of right now, an instance of this class is initialized when the MDI parent form is created. My problem comes in when I pull up a child form to create and initialize an instance of the object I want to manage and add it to the dictionary. Shouldn't the dictionary object be visible to all children forms of the parent or is this the wrong type of thinking?