Question

I have one main form, and i want to dynamically change it’s content, via pressing some buttons.
Let’s say i have a button “New user” and “Login”, and if I press new user, i don’t want to make new form + show, i want all labels and buttons of new user to be displayed right in the main form. And if i press login, the main form content to change to some labels and textboxes?
This is just for example.
All I can now, is just make new forms and show them to the user via .Show() command.

Answer 1

Let’s say you have Customer, Product and Vendor “windows”. You don’t want to make separate windows from them, so you group all of their controls inside groupboxes and make them visible/invisible depending on user actions. This will work, but it leads to problems of code readability and maintainability: you’re writing a lot of code for a lot of controls inside your window which is, after all, just one class.

So you can do this: create a user control named usrCustomer or myCustomer or whatever, and paste into it all the controls related to Customer: the groupbox, the labels, the combos, everything. Then you can decide if you want to add this mega-control to your main form on design time or if you wanna create a new instance of it in run-time everytime you need it. If in the future you have to modify something, you’ll go to a separate class (ctlCostumer) instead of having to dig inside a monster main form class.

CAVEAT: you’ll have to be careful if those controls share information between them, (if the Product mega-control needs to know something from the Customer mega-control) and expose that info with public properties, etc.