Make a borderless form movable?

This article on CodeProject details a technique. Is basically boils down to:

public const int WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN = 0xA1;
public const int HT_CAPTION = 0x2;

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
public static extern int SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int Msg, int wParam, int lParam);
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
public static extern bool ReleaseCapture();

private void Form1_MouseDown(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs e)
{     
    if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left)
    {
        ReleaseCapture();
        SendMessage(Handle, WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN, HT_CAPTION, 0);
    }
}

This essentially does exactly the same as grabbing the title bar of a window, from the window manager's point of view.


Let's not make things any more difficult than they need to be. I've come across so many snippets of code that allow you to drag a form around (or another Control). And many of them have their own drawbacks/side effects. Especially those ones where they trick Windows into thinking that a Control on a form is the actual form.

That being said, here is my snippet. I use it all the time. I'd also like to note that you should not use this.Invalidate(); as others like to do because it causes the form to flicker in some cases. And in some cases so does this.Refresh. Using this.Update, I have not had any flickering issues:

private bool mouseDown;
private Point lastLocation;

    private void Form1_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        mouseDown = true;
        lastLocation = e.Location;
    }

    private void Form1_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        if(mouseDown)
        {
            this.Location = new Point(
                (this.Location.X - lastLocation.X) + e.X, (this.Location.Y - lastLocation.Y) + e.Y);

            this.Update();
        }
    }

    private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
    {
        mouseDown = false;
    }