If you're looking to customize the TabControl there's way easier solutions. By customize I mean custom drawing it. You can basically draw everthing as long as you know where and when to draw it. If that's what you are looking for let me know, I can send you a VS2010 style TabControl so you can take a look. In the meanwhile, have a look here, there's lots of stuff about custom drawing tabcontrols and also a lot of design-time solutions. For example, the PanelManager on that website was the base for my WizardControl.