Organizing Windows Form UI Components at Design Time

[curtis.j...@gmail.com]

I am designing a UI with Windows Forms and C#. The main part of the UI
(in the center) is context sensitive - it changes based on the user
selections in the navigation bar on the left hand side - the
appropriate center UI elements are made visible or hidden based on the
user selection.

That 'center area' is now very cluttered at design time (in the visual
designer). What is a good technique to avoid this? I would like to use
a tab control and then just hide the actual tabs, but there is no
property on the native tab control to do this...

What is the standard practice for doing this at design time?

Thanks,
Curtis

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

<curtis.j...@gmail.com> schrieb:

>I am designing a UI with Windows Forms and C#. The main part of the UI
> (in the center) is context sensitive - it changes based on the user
> selections in the navigation bar on the left hand side - the
> appropriate center UI elements are made visible or hidden based on the
> user selection.
>
> That 'center area' is now very cluttered at design time (in the visual
> designer). What is a good technique to avoid this? I would like to use
> a tab control and then just hide the actual tabs, but there is no
> property on the native tab control to do this...

You may want to use user controls ("Project" -> "Add user control...") for
the different "views".

--
M S Herfried K. Wagner
M V P <URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/>
V B <URL:http://classicvb.org/petition/>

[Curtis]

Thanks - that helps. This allows me to design each seperate context
sensitive 'center piece' as an individual component. I still like the
tab-control-type solution so all the UI pieces appear at design time
where they will be show up at run time, but this will suffice.

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

"Curtis" <curtis.j...@gmail.com> schrieb:

Removing a tabcontrol's tabpage headers
<URL:http://dotnet.mvps.org/dotnet/faqs/?id=tabcontrolremoveheaders&lang=en>

IIRC this doesn't disable keyboard navigation between the tabs.

[Curtis]

Thanks - a bit of hack, but it works. I am surprised they just didn't
support this in the .NET control - maybe it's coming.

I am finding the seperate User Control will promote a cleaner
design....

[xiaoy...@gmail.com]

Very interesting topic, you may take a look at some WinForms UI Component and C# UI Component Tutorial:

http://www.kettic.com/winforms_ui/

http://www.kettic.com/winforms_ui/controls_and_tutorials.shtml