Windows Vista,  has a great feature that has been introduced within the user interface.  Textbox fields when they are empty display their label, as follows:

What a great idea to implement this feature on Windows mobile; this would save vast amount of screen space as textbox labels seem to utilise lots of screen space (certainly on the LOB apps I write).

So with half an hour to kill this morning I produced a quick proof of concept that achieve this.  

Screenshot below, showing textbox not in focus.   Notice label colour is gray.

Screenshot below, showing textbox in focus

The code behind this is as follows, just implementing the GotFocus and LostFocus events on the textbox control:

private bool inlabelmode = true;

private string labeltext = "Our Box";

public Form1()

this.trackBar1.Focus();

private void labelon()

this.textBox1.ForeColor = Color.Gray;

this.textBox1.Text = labeltext;

inlabelmode = true;

private void labeloff()

this.textBox1.Text = "";

this.textBox1.ForeColor = Color.Red;

inlabelmode = false;

private void textBox1_GotFocus(object sender, EventArgs e)

if (inlabelmode) labeloff();

private void textBox1_LostFocus(object sender, EventArgs e)

if (this.textBox1.Text == "") labelon();