The above shows a wizard created using a control I developed that can allow developers to implement wizards in their programs with very minimal coding. After referencing the assembly in your Windows Forms project, you may drag the control onto a Form and configure the wizard as you would any other control. I have attached a demo solution that shows what can be done with it. However, the control has very intuitive design time behavior which I will lay out in this post.
Design-Time
After spreading the control on a Form it should look like this:-
The control is very similar to a TabControl. In a TabControl you have to add tab pages to it. With the WizardControl, you have to add WizardPanels to it. You may quickly add panels to it via the control's smart tag.
The smart tag allows you to quickly add panels to the WizardControl at design time. You may also add panels through the the control's WizardPanels property:-
Using that property to manipulate the wizard's panels also gives you finer control in configuring the panels. You may add, remove, or re-order the panels from the collection editor. You may also adjust its properties as well.
The WizardControl's panels can be selected in the designer as well. You should note that both the WizardControl and its panels are separately selectable at design time. You may select the current panel by clicking on its surface at design time. From here you can change its properties via the property grid as you would any other control.
If you want to select the WizardControl itself in design mode while it has panels you must click on the navigation bar:-
You may select the WizardControl while it has an active panel by clicking anywhere within the red boxes outlined in the image above.
Notice that we avoid the "Next" and "Previous" buttons. That's because those buttons are clickable in design mode. They allow you to easily navigate between panels at design time so you can add, remove and configure controls dragged to their surface:-
Just like a TabControl, you drag and drop controls to the wizard's panels' surfaces.
Final Notes
Look to the next post for the attachment of the demo solution. In that solution a few things are demonstrated about using the control. The code in the solution is also commented to help explain how things are done. Suggestions, bug reports and other comments are welcomed.
Enjoy. See next post for demo.
Reply With Quote
