Controls initializing during form_load

[treddie]

Sorry to bother everybody with this one.

Years ago, I remember running into this problem, but I have checked prior projects and my own tuts to find the solution and I can't find it.

The problem is this. A form initializes on app startup. In the process, vb.Net seems to behave differently than vb6 in how it initializes the controls on the form. In vb6, it seemed that controls were not initialized automatically until I invoked them with something like:

Textbox1.text = "blah-blah-blah"

That would fire my textbox_change procedure. So in order to prevent all the code in the textbox procedure from executing, just before initializing any of my controls, I would put a flag in my form_load procedure:

FormIsLoading= 1

Then, any control procedures would start out with the line:

If FormIsLoading = 1 Then Exit Sub

But in vb.Net this does not seem to work. It seems that .Net initializes a form's controls automatically, and before it executes any code in a form_load procedure. Is this the case? And if so, how do you tell .Net to not execute all the code in a control's procedure? So I thought maybe I could set the flag in the main_form.designer area, since it is a lower level area, and it DOES look like that is where the controls are getting initialized. So I tried it, and it seems to work. But is this a dangerous place to be putting code, and did I just get away with it this time, and maybe setting myself up for disaster in some future app?