Question

I am currently in the process of improving my options dialog for a winforms application. At the moment I am using a tab control.

I would like to create a form/dialog for settings that is similar to Visual Studio’s. How is this done? I can see a treeview like control on the left hand side but what control are they using to display each of the options pages, it doesn’t appear to be a tab control. I would like to be able to build the controls for each of the settings at design time.

Thanks.

Answer 1

They look to me like UserControls. I can’t say how exactly they implement it, but it would be simple enough to build a UserControl for each option type and swap out the current control when the tree view selection changes. In your designer you would simply have the TreeView and a parent panel to host the UserControls. At runtime you would perform the swap.