Question

I’m a real dummy at UI building, so I’m wondering – what .NET winforms control would be best to use if aiming to display tweets in a list fashion that updates with like boxes which contain the text of the tweet and its metadata below it. Is there a specific winforms list function for this type of thing? Or do you recommend I look for/use a third party winforms control? Thanks! Hope my question wasn’t too silly.

UPDATE: I am getting indication from numerous responses that it would be better to just build a simple winform control myself, but can anyone point me to a tutorial for doing so? Also, if i were to build such a control, does there exist a convenient built-in control for making like a list of custom controls that is scrollable – maybe Panel? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I’d build a user control that would display the information for a single tweet. I’d then repeat that user control in a panel.

You could just use the same layout in your user control that is standard for “tweets”.

Left justified picture box to display the user image.
LinkLabel for user name.
Label for tweet text.

Update: Here are a couple pages on UserControls

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/a6h7e207(VS.71).aspx
http://www.akadia.com/services/dotnet_user_controls.html

Create a usercontrol using the designer and also a Tweet class that is
just a dumb data structure to hold each tweet’s information. Also create a Tweet
property on the custom user control that would handle setting the tweet and assigning information
to the standard controls contained in it (Labels, Textboxs, PictureBox, etc).

In the form where you want to host your user control create a panel that is empty. Somewhere in your code you
would do something similar to this code block.

        pnlHost.Controls.Clear();

        List<Tweet> tweets = new List<Tweet>();

        //Populate your collection of tweets here

        foreach (Tweet tweet in tweets)
        {
            TweetControl control = new TweetControl();
            control.Tweet = tweet;

            pnlHost.Controls.Add(control);
            control.Dock = DockStyle.Top;

        }