How to prevent control from stealing focus?

Question

We have a 3rd party control loaded in our C# WinForms app.

When we call a method on this 3rd party ActiveX control, it asynchronously steals focus. For example:

// This call causes 3rd party to spawn a thread and steal focus 
// milliseconds later.
foo3rdParty.DoSomething();

Is there a way to prevent a control from stealing focus?

Answer 1

If this evil little control isn't meant to be visible, you could place it on an invisible form and call DoSomething() on it there. Then, who cares if it grabs the focus?