Many controls on form

[Athley]

Hi there!

I am to develop a configuration utility for a SQL database with lots of tables. My idea was to do this like the VB .NET Tools/Options form with a treeview and the controls displayed to the right of that.

I first tried a MDI version but a couple of BUG's have made me reconsider.

Basicly I wonder how that form is built? What I can think of and what it looks like is that its the same form that they display different panels on. If that is the case how do they at design time keep track of 60 panels? I have done similar things before with 4 panels, and then you can design them with the panels placed beside one another and before compile put them on top of each other. That feels impossible with 60 panels.

Is it some trick that I overlooked or is it just built in another way? User drawn controls maybe?

Any thoughts is appreciated.

[Mr.No]

Athley

I don't think having up to 60 panels on a form would be a good idea. I think you could use the visual inheritance feature of VB.NET, i.e. have a base form with all the common functionalities and then create 60 forms which would inherit from the base form. Alternatively, to "fool" the user in believing that everything is in the same form may be you could use something I did in VB6 using the SetParent API. The way it operated was as follows: I had a main form with next/previous/close buttons and then many forms (no border) named frm01, frm02, frm03 etc. Each time I wanted to display a form, say frm01 I used Setparent API to make frmMain the parent of frm01. Then using frm01.Move 10,60 the frm01 appeared part of frmMain. Because the frm01 form is borderless the user won't be able to move it out of the main form by using the mouse and also the form will move together with the main form.

Well thats a brief idea of what I did in VB6, haven't tried it in Vb.NET yet.

[Athley]

That is sure worth a try, so thanks a million!

Still wanna know how MS did it (maybe that was just the way) but I have a feeling they wont tell me.