Question

I would like to have the tabs on my TabControl displayed on the left, or sometimes right.
Unlike the System.Windows.Forms.TabControl, however, I would like the text to remain horizontal instead of being rotated by 90 or 270 degrees to the horizontal.

Here are a couple of pictures illustrating the concept

Though I could write code to do this myself in about an hour or two, I just thought I’d ask first if there is any existing Winforms control that implements such feature.

NB: Any existing solution should preferably be non-commercial.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I don’t know how robust this is and I can’t claim to have created it but…
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/125792-how-to-make-vertical-tabs/

Here’s a way of doing it.

So first we are going to change its alignment to Left, by setting the property:

Alignment = Left

If you have XP themes turned on then you may notice the weird layout of Tab Control. Don’t worry we will make it fine.

As you may have noticed that Tabs are vertical, and our requirement is horizontal. So we can change the size of Tabs. But before we can do this we have to set the SizeMode property as,

SizeMode = Fixed

Now we can change the size by using the ItemSize property,

ItemSize = 30, 120
Width = 30 and Height = 120

After setting the Alignment = Left, Tab control rotates the Tabs which causes the Width and Height seem to be reversed. That is why when we increase Height, we see that width is increasing and when we increase width the height is effected.

Now Text will also be displaying, but vertically. Unfortunately there is no simple way to resolve this issue. For this purpose we have to write the Text by ourselves. To do this we will first set the DrawMode

DrawMode = OwnerDrawFixed

01

Private Sub TabControl1_DrawItem(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.DrawItemEventArgs) Handles TabControl1.DrawItem
    Dim g As Graphics
    Dim sText As String

    Dim iX As Integer
    Dim iY As Integer
    Dim sizeText As SizeF

    Dim ctlTab As TabControl

    ctlTab = CType(sender, TabControl)

    g = e.Graphics

    sText = ctlTab.TabPages(e.Index).Text
    sizeText = g.MeasureString(sText, ctlTab.Font)

    iX = e.Bounds.Left + 6
    iY = e.Bounds.Top + (e.Bounds.Height - sizeText.Height) / 2

    g.DrawString(sText, ctlTab.Font, Brushes.Black, iX, iY)
End Sub